There is one more story I’d like to share as I end the series on life lessons learned while living overseas. It’s another one from Russia but it’s a special one engrained in my heart.

The Russian town I lived in was small by Russian standards, only about 100,000 people. There was one small and very old hospital. The previous year I had an emergency appendectomy there and soon realized there is not much to do during the day. No televisions, no food service, nothing – just some radios that didn’t work that well. Visitors were greatly treasured.

A teammate and I began weekly visits with the patients in the women’s ward. The women on this ward were in the hospital for 4 weeks. Needless to say they were eager to talk with anyone who walked through the door.

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Most Christians have heard of the rosary, but relatively few know that using beads as a tool to aid in prayer is an ancient practice that can be found in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy as well as Roman Catholicism. Since I’m Anglican, I’m going to focus on the Anglican rosary as a spiritual discipline.

 

The Anglican rosary (like the Roman Catholic rosary and the Eastern Orthodox prayer rope) is intended to be used as a tactile aid for contemplative prayer: the person praying repeats a short, traditional prayer while holding each bead of the rosary in turn. Far from being the mindless repetition that Jesus condemned, repeated prayers such as these are an attempt to take seriously Scripture’s call to “pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

Over the past few years, I’ve been amazed at how the repetition of a simple prayer helps settle my distracted thoughts and center them on God.

We all know being dishonest with others is wrong and unacceptable: enough said. But there’s a kind of dishonesty we usually don’t talk about: being dishonest with ourselves. It happens when we’re unwilling to admit our personal faults and weaknesses. We convince ourselves that we can overcome our greatest weaknesses on our own. We go on without accountability. Eventually, either by force or surrender, though, we have to come to terms with who we really are.

If worry is like a dancing bear, then dishonesty is like a monkey with clanging cymbals. I’m a drummer—while we’re being honest, I prefer to be called a percussionist; if you’re a musician, you will get the joke, if not, I’ll just say I do more than bang on trash cans—so I love the toy monkeys with clanging cymbals. And I love the videos of monkeys trying to play with percussion instruments. (That stuff is make your ribs-hurt funny.) But when the monkey with clanging cymbals comes on the scene, we have a hard time hearing anything else. While that monkey is telling us lies about good music, like a garage-band drummer, we can’t hear the real melody. We can’t tune for the life of us. Eventually, we end up playing punk rock and having black hair, and calling ourselves an artist. (I did that, for the record.)

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The world seemed to stand still for a moment 6 months ago when a powerful earthquake rumbled its way through the tiny country of Haiti and destroying everything in its path. My friend Stuart was there. You can read and see more of Stuart in Haiti during that time here. Newspapers wrote about it and Stuart witnessed that God is very active in Haiti among the Haitian survivors. Below is a recent article Stuart wrote for Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, student magazine Contact. (Stuart and I became friends while students at the seminary). How cool it would be if the country known for so long now as the poorest in the western hemisphere, will now and forever be known as God's country!

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“Restless” literally means “lacking rest.” That doesn’t sound good – but in fact restlessness can be a good thing. St Augustine famously wrote in the Confessions that our hearts are restless until they rest in God; restlessness can be the spur that drives us to arise from our entrenched state of alienation and dissatisfaction to seek after what we really need.

On a more practical level, “restlessness” is an interesting word, because it covers two quite different states of mind. These two states could be described as “bad” and “good” restlessness, but actually it’s a little more complicated than that.  

The first kind is probably the one I know best – the restlessness of being tired and yet having work to do. While I’m trying to concentrate on grading papers, or paying bills, or doing the assigned reading for a class I’m taking, I’m distracted by a thousand and one things that seem more appealing than what I’m doing right now.

Christians pray. But why? What’s the point? What do you say to the One who knows you better than you know yourself?

After a lot of discussion with my Christian friends and mentors about their prayer lives, I finally understood that prayer can’t be seen in isolation as an action that we do in order to get something. Rather, prayer is about relationship with God. As we pray, we are drawn up into the deepest relationship there is: the most holy Trinity, the eternal loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In prayer, we don’t tell anything to God that He doesn’t already know. But that’s also how it is when we speak with our friends and family – when our relationships are at their best.

If I send a card to a friend saying “Happy birthday,” what purpose did that serve? She already knew it was her birthday! The message is that I care about her – but wait, she already knew that, too; we’ve been friends for years.

The book of Nehemiah, traditionally considered a book of history, is a wonderful picture of a man of prayer. Nehemiah lived in Susa, one of the captials of the Persian Empire, located about 350 km from Babylon, where many of the Israelites were exiled in the fifth century B.C. In Susa, Nehemiah was employed by King Artaxerxes where he worked as a cupbearer to the king (Neh 1:11). In the first chapter of this book, Nehemiah opens with a first-person narrative of his experiences when he first heard about the destruction of the wall of Jerusalem and the general apathy demonstrated by the remnant of Jews there (Neh 1:1-3). Nehemiah's response was one of grief and sorrow, which led him to action. He boldly asked the king for permission to go to Jerusalem and oversee a rebuilding process there. The king granted him permission and dedicated resources to accomplish the task.

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Have you spent much time with Nehemiah?

This book from the Hebrew scriptures is categorized as one of the twelve books of history. It has been a favorite of mine since about 2003, when I first delved in to the rich narrative it offers about Israel's history and one man's bone-deep burning for the glory of God and his people, Israel.

I remember like it was yesterday in early 2003, when I went with my friend Becky to Florida for a few days to celebrate her graduation from college. We were sitting on the beach in our bathing suits and I was studying Nehemiah, captivated by the depiction of him interceding for Israel with King Artaxerxes (Neh 1-2) and then boldly fending off the opposition as he led God's people in rebuilding the wall of the temple in Jerusalem (Neh 2-6).

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Everybody sure is talking about prayer these days. Between the hoopla over the National Day of Prayer and Franklin Graham's insistence that he be allowed to pray inside the Pentagon, prayer seems to be on everybody's lips, media included. That's a good thing, right? I'm not so sure.

Consider how we got to this interesting place, where the very idea of public praying has become controversial. First, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb in Madison last month found the National Day of Prayer, established by Congress 58 years ago and held on the first Thursday of May, to be unconstitutional.

Then, on Aprill 22 the U.S. Army "disinvited" Franklin Graham, who had been scheduled to speak at a Pentagon National Day of Prayer event because his comments about Islam were "inappropriate.'

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LifeWay Research’s recent survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds showed that 72% of them are “really more spiritual than religious.” Spirituality is good. But there’s a catch. (There always is).

“65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.” How can you be spiritual without prayer? I would argue that you can’t. We have to pray to reach the spiritual. Praying is certainly not the only way to be spiritual, but it is one of the primary ways we build relationship with God. “Living kindly” or “being one with ourselves” is not enough. That’s not spiritual; that’s humanitarian and egocentric. (Yes, you can be both a humanitarian and egocentric.) We have to commune with God to truly be spiritual. Otherwise, we are just being good humans. Being good humans is indeed good, but we can never be “good enough” to be accepted by God. We need Jesus. So how are we going to convince people to pray?

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