Prayer As NonPrayer As Prayer

The more I pray and pursue God, the greater my sense of ineptitude. My mind wanders, I pray. I lack faith, I pray. I get bored, I pray. I listen for God and all is quiet, I pray. I feel like a failure, I pray. Give me ten minutes on my knees listening for God and I lose my mind in babbling thoughts and bizarre visuals. But when I go out and walk and pray, I become alert with the concentrated gaze fixed on me. It is as if all else fades as I keep going up the hill...the houses, the workers, the yards, even the breeze becomes lost to me as I slip into Christ. Not always is it like this, sometimes it lasts for only moments, but often enough to make me want more. Prayer at times is more a longing for God than it is a clear sense of Him but the older I get the more I want that longing than any sort of "spiritual success". It seems to me that prayer is far more than Yhwh descending upon my Mt. Sinai, it is the craving I have for Him and the willingness to give Him control of little details in my day. This morning I was trying to get some spots out of the carpet in our church sanctuary. I had poured drops of water on each spot and now was rubbing out the stains. As I knelt, I felt as close to Jesus as I had in weeks. The moment slipped away quickly but the subtlety of God invading my "useless work" took my breath away. God is more invisble than I ever thought when I first starting reading the Bible stories as a child. He is far more a whisper than I dreamed. It frightens me at times to try to put together the death of a teen in a car wreck and the promises of God being our rock and shelter because the two seem so irreconsilable yet then Christ slips in and I am lost in Him. I never know when that will happen and no amount of praying has ever forced it but it just does happen if I take my walks...sometime, somewhere.