- When We Pray
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Devotion By Tyler Staton “Praying Like Monks, Living like Fools”
Give us this day our daily bread. – Matthew 6:11
“Praise and thanksgiving are always appropriate, certainly. And it’s certain that our final prayers will all be praise-heaven reverberating with our amens and hallelujahs, so practicing the scales of praise is always a good idea. But for here and now we mostly ask. Jesus taught us to ask.” Eugene Peterson
Control is a good desire that is out of order. Control is a surface-level symptom of a soul-level desire for fruitfulness. We want to live consequential lives. We want to make a marked difference in the world, to matter in both a personal and profound way. But when we clinch our jaws and put that desire into action, we end up exhausted and overwhelmed. The millennial generation, of which I am part, is the most socially conscious, globally minded, justice-oriented generation in recent memory. We are also the most mentally ill and chronically unhappy. We are a generation of people doing exactly what we want with our lives, channeling our energy freely in the chosen pursuits for global good, and yet we are completely overwhelmed, utterly exhausted, and chronically anxious. Those are symptoms of a good desire out of order.
Many have a subconscious, internal monologue that goes something like this: “I want to live a fruitful, meaningful life, but I’m just not sure I can trust God. I can trust him as my answer to the big, theological questions, but I’m not sure if I can trust him with my dreams, my hopes, and my plans. I can trust him ultimately, but I doubt I can trust him immediately.” So, I’m white-knuckling my life with everything I’ve got micromanaging my surroundings, my perception, and my next step.
When we trust God with our worldview but not our current experience in the world, we’re falling victim to the lore of control. How many of us are exhausted, overwhelmed, and chronically anxious because we’re trying to satisfy good desires by the wrong means? Luke’s record of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter and pithier than Matthew’s. In Luke’s recollection, which includes only five petitions, “daily bread” is the central, third request, the hinge on which the whole prayer turns. “Daily bread” is the heartbeat at the prayer’s center.
Jesus teaches us to include the phrase “give us” in our prayers. Daily, as we ask, he weans us off our addiction to independence, our insistence on living under the illusion that what we most deeply desire we can feed ourselves all on our own. Our requests are not the spoiled whining of a child or the shaking change cup of a beggar. Daily bread prayers are a daily reminder that we are not in charge, not in control. Prayer replaces control with trust. A God-given desire is only fulfilled by God-given means.