3 results for tag: Prayer
Prayer: Praying Scripture When You Get Stuck in Prayer
Most of us would agree that we need God in grief (no matter how we feel about Him). During dark nights of the soul, we come face to face with our humanness–our frailty & our inability to take another step (or another breath) without His divine intervention. If we need God so much, then that means we must talk with Him. Yet talking with Him–praying–can feel very very hard. Our minds wander, we say the same things over and over, and we feel bored or just plain lost.
This struggle is quite the conundrum! We need to pray–to offer up our pain, hurt, confusion, hope and gratitude–but it feels unattainable at times. What do we do?
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Gentle Ideas to Help Your Prayer Life in Grief
This month I cover various topics on prayer. Many of them were inspired by ideas found in a little-known book on prayer, Long Wandering Prayer by David Hansen. It has become a new favorite.
Prayer can be a tricky and difficult thing for all of us even when we aren’t in a season of grief. A gifted British preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, once said, “everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.” Adding the loss of a baby can make prayer feel absolutely unreachable.
For me, in the months after William went to Heaven, prayer was next to impossible: I wasn’t sure how I felt about God and didn’t really want to talk to Him, but ...
Why Do I Run From You?
“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?”
—Psalm 139:7
In the raw ache of grief, I’ve asked this more than once:
“Why do I run from You, Lord, when You’re the only one who understands me?”
It doesn’t make sense on paper. God is my refuge, my comfort, my healer. I know this. I’ve sung it in church, I’ve whispered it in the dark, and yet, when the pain crashed in—when my arms felt empty and my heart shattered—I didn’t fall into His. I pulled away. In those raw and early days of grief, instead of leaning into His presence, I often retreated. I numbed. I avoided. I distracted myself ...
