Dr. Bob on Prayer

Dr. Bob writes about prayer in an essay inspired by Gerard Van der Leun's essay last week.

Instructions for reading: Do not scan this post. Read it slowly and carefully when you have time to reflect. If that time is not now, then mark it to come back to later.

It is in many ways an odd but satisfying conversation: I speak, He listens–yet somehow I know what He is thinking, and He most surely knows my thoughts. It is decidedly non-linear. The questions I ask, the problems I present, are answered–always. But not in words, almost never at the time I speak or ask. But I know they have been answered–although the fruition, the language, the form of the answer may be hours, months, years away. It may arrive as circumstances, or in a conversation with a complete stranger in another time and place, or in an entirely unexpected–even unwanted–change of heart or inner peace about some deeply troubling or puzzling dilemna. Yet I know it is God’s answer–the answer He gave me back at that table, shootin’ the breeze and guzzling joe. It is a conversation freed from time and space–bizarre, but strangely more real than that which we unwisely and hastily call “reality.”