Peterson on Prayer
"As a pastor I was charged with, among other things, teaching people to pray, helping them to give voice to the entire experience of being human, and to do it both honestly and thoroughly...The impulse to pray is deep within us, at the very center of our created being, and so practically anything will do to get us started- 'Help' and 'Thanks! are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don't come quite as spontaneously...Untutored, we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not. Inexperienced, we suppose that there must be an 'insider' language that must be acquired before God takes us seriously in our prayer. There is not. Prayer is elemental, not advanced, language. It is the means by which our language becomes honest, true, and personal in response to God. It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God...I continue to want to do that, convinced that only as we develop raw honesty and detailed thoroughness in our praying do we become whole, truly human in Jesus Christ."
By: Eugene H. Peterson, THE MESSAGE Remix, 2003, Pages 899-900.
posted by Kellie # 2:58 PM
