After my ridiculous poetry class on Thursday night, I drove a little less than four hours to visit my best friend for the weekend. I am one of those people who answers my phone while driving, so when it rang, I turned off the stereo so that I could hear my mom asking where I was and if I was all right in the rain. When I hung up with her, I was listening to the rain landing on my car and decided to leave the music off. So instead, I listened to the rain and tried to talk with God.
Now, it's been a while since I have tried to sustain prayer for longer than it takes to say thank you for something incredible or ask for help. And I found that I was really bad at it. I kept drifting off in mid-sentence. It probably took me fifteen minutes to stop singing songs to myself to fill the quiet.
I wasn't waiting for God to say something to me. I would have been open to anything He wanted to tell me, but my real goal was to tell Him some things. While I do understand that God knows things even before I can think them, I also think it is important to let Him in. Not just let Him in, but invite Him. Maybe it's my way of expressing that the things I feel and think, He is in on those things with me. Not because He already was. But because I want Him to be.
This sounds like my hour in the car without any music was a really powerful spiritual experience. And it wasn't. Not really. At least not right at that moment. And I've had some really powerful spiritual experiences, the kind that you can look back at and recognize for what they are even while they are still happening. I collect those moments in my heart in a special file folder with a little label that says "IMPORTANT." But this moment is important too, even though it was mostly a failed attempt. Because it was an attempt. And God for one appreciates the effort.
So I listened to the rain for an hour. And I tried to tell God some things while He was looking down at me driving my car on the interstate and saying, "I know. I'm already working on it. But thanks for asking me to ride along with you." And what I was really saying all along was "I love you too."
(For any interested party: the first thing I listened to when I turned the music back on? Britney Spears' Blackout. It was awesome.)*
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* That is seriously not a joke. Team Britney.
the rules: 1) one word titles that promise to be at least loosely related to posts 2) little to no name dropping (translated: this blog isn't about who said what) 3) unless I can't get in touch with you some other way, no commenting back on my own posts. Other than that, anything goes (though I am prudish and overly literate).
when I was feeling brave.
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1 comment:
I think that is a really good way to look at prayer. You're right, it's not as if God doesn't already know everything we think and feel and need before it ever occurs to us. A lot of people would say, "Well if he already knows, why bother telling him about it?" But yeah, I think it's the idea of conversation that is really important. We talk to our friends, right? We talk to our family. Even if they already know us so well, it's that sharing and invitation as you put it. God loves that, doesn't he? Thank you for reminding me of this, Molly!
Oh, and no comment about team Brittney. I did have warning about this side of you ;)
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