Lectio
“We must not wait for common sense, our acquaintances, or our schedules to make room for prayer and to support our efforts. If we do, prayer will never come. If we wait for the time in which to wait for God we will never wait for him. We will never discover in prayer our true self in God.”
— James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere
Meditatio
God always has time for us. In fact, God created time for us — in order to be in relationship with his creation. The rising and setting of the sun. The coming and going of the seasons. The turning of the earth. All of this, for us. Not because we are the center of the universe, but because he loves us and time itself is his gift to us, an opportunity to say to him, “I love you also.” He wants to spend with us the time he created for us. And he wants us to want to spend our time with him.
God himself exists outside of time as we know it, in and as eternity — the eternal now that was before all creation and will be after all creation — and from which all creation is formed out of love. As the apostle Peter says, “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Peter 3:8). And in eternity God awaits us. He awaits our turning through the finite and transitory toward the infinite and enduring. He awaits our abiding in his eternity with him, not in the sense that God sits around watching a clock, but in the sense that God’s deepest, perhaps his only, desire is that we recollect ourselves eternally in eternal union with his eternal love.
While we are incapable of recollecting ourselves in God or abiding there with him without grace initiating and sustaining our re-turning to him, we do have a calling in this relationship with eternity, and that is to consent to it, to make time for it, and to abide in it whenever we can and for as long as we can, no matter how imperfectly and inconsistently, in this life as we prepare for our transition into the next. We have the calling to make time for worship. We have the calling to make time for prayer. We have the calling to make time for God who made time for us so that we can spend time with him. And once grace awakens us to this calling, we must not waste time making time for the creator of time.
And yet God does not really want or need our time, let alone a measly twenty or sixty minutes a day. What God wants is our whole selves — heart, soul, and mind — given freely in love. But as much as we may desire giving him our whole selves, we waver, we falter, and we resist. And we often do this unintentionally, unknowingly, or as Paul confesses in his letter to the Romans, unwillingly: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). God remains faithful and awaits our faithfulness in return. Like the father awaiting his prodigal son’s return, God looks for us on the horizon, waiting for us to look back at him. The least we can do is to look back at him each day at a dedicated time, for a dedicated amount of time — not forty days in the desert as Jesus did, but long enough to feel temptations arise and to witness our ever-faithful God sustain us through them.
We must not wait. We must not wait for common sense to catch up. We must not wait for our schedules to free up. We must not wait for our acquaintances or employers to loosen up and to understand what God is calling us to do. No. We will always be too busy. There will always be something more pressing, more urgent, more demanding of our attention. But busyness is not the obstacle. It’s merely an excuse we give for not prioritizing God — for not giving him our first-fruits. The resistance Paul confesses is the same resistance we bring to prayer. Yet God is both loving and insistent.
The antidote is not to wait until the conditions are right, until the calendar clears, until we feel ready. The antidote is to show up anyway, to go into our room and shut the door and pray to our Father who is in secret, as Jesus invites us — with and through him — to trust that the God who sees in secret and who always has time for us because he made time for us is already there waiting to reward us. And we come to find that he has, in fact, been waiting all along, inviting us into eternity even before we feel ready and asking us to trust and enter into that place with him though we feel we are not ready.
Oratio
Lord take me to you
through this wilderness
of despair
and temptation
my heart aches for your touch
don’t leave me alone
just the hem of your cloak
is enough to heal even me
I am not worthy
of your love
may I receive your love
Contemplatio
What would it mean for you to treat your daily prayer time as the first-fruits you offer to God rather than the last remnant of a busy day?
Related Scripture
“But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” — Matthew 6:6 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Already Loved: How God’s Infinite Love Calls Us to Love in Return, which explores the gift of divine love as the very ground that makes our love for God possible — and how receiving that love is itself an act of prayer and consent.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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