You and I are jars of muddy water.
When our lives are in constant motion, everything is murky.
Even our prayers are busy.
At a recent men’s group meeting at church, Deacon Jim noted that prayer isn’t meant to be a flurry of activity in which we busy ourselves with a holy to-do list: Read the Bible. Listen to a homily. Recite certain prayers. Journal our thoughts. Read from a devotional. Plan next week.
These are all good things, but Deacon Jim reminded us that God just wants us to BE with Him. We can spend an entire hour doing all the “talking” without spending one minute listening to what He wants to tell us.
One gentleman spoke up, “I hear people talk about meditation all the time. Listening to God. But what does He sound like? What do you hear?”
Deacon Jim went on to describe his typical experience of spending an hour before the Lord in adoration, which I’ll try to paraphrase.
The first twenty minutes is all the stuff. The noise. Your brain is busy sorting through all the things that happened that week.
Muddy water.
It’s also torture, because it feels useless and unproductive.
The best way to clear a jar of muddy water?
Leave it alone.
After a while, he said, you start to see connections between the events that transpired. You don’t usually hear words, per se, although once in a while a word or phrase bubbles up. Sometimes you get an understanding of why things happened the way they did, and a sense of what you’re called to do next.
If we take the time to sit for a bit, the dirt settles, and life gets clearer.
Eventually, you experience peacefulness as all the noise fades into the background. It’s just you and God. Nothing else matters. Before long, it’s time to go, and you wonder how time could go so fast.
Like I said, the in-between is torture, and where most people give up. You start overthinking it, doubt yourself, and assume you’re doing it wrong, or not one of those “meditation” people.
Here’s a tip that might be helpful, which comes from my days as a cartoonist. The main ingredient of a daily strip is not drawings, but rather a steady stream of ideas. They don’t come by magic, and trust me, if you wait for inspiration to strike, you’re no longer doing a daily comic strip.
I tried to set aside time every day to write. In the early days, I’d sit there for five minutes, get nothing, conclude I didn’t have it that day, and bail. Why waste any more time?
The magic happened when I started a new approach.
I decided to focus not on the outcome, but on the effort. I committed to sitting for fifteen minutes, no matter what. The goal was no longer to “come up with ideas.” The goal was only to sit on the couch for fifteen minutes with my sketchbook open and my pencil ready to go. It didn’t matter if I was thirteen minutes along and my page was still blank; there were two minutes left, and I wasn’t going to budge. I gave myself permission to be ok with zero ideas, as long as I sat there for fifteen minutes.
Once in a while, that’s what happened: Fifteen minutes. Zero ideas.
Much of the time, “writing” looked more like me sitting on the couch staring into space.
But something peculiar began happening. On a day that started fruitlessly, when I forced myself to accept an apparent waste of time, an idea would pop into my head at say, minute twelve. Maybe it wasn’t a very good one, but I’d jot it down. Then a few more would percolate, and by the end of my allotted time, I’d have one or two decent jokes.
Most days were like that. As I kept to the routine, it became more fruitful. If I skipped a few days, however, it would be more difficult to pick back up where I left off.
I’ve adopted the same approach to my prayer time, especially time in adoration, and it works!
It’s simple. Instead of trying to achieve enlightenment or hear a proclamation from on high, just commit to sitting your butt in the chair or pew for fifteen minutes.
In silence.
No reading, no writing, no planning, no “doing” of any kind. If it looks like you sitting there, staring blankly into space like a dope, congrats, you’re doing it right!
This classic scene from Seinfeld is a perfect depiction. Imagine that David Puddy is YOU at adoration, just staring at the monstrance. His girlfriend Elaine is your BRAIN while you’re doing it:
Embrace your inner David Puddy. If you do it for the full fifteen minutes, you win! And here’s the key, even if you didn’t get one encouraging word, one tiny whisper, or one warm, fuzzy feeling — even if your brain swirled incessantly like a pinball machine on cocaine and it felt like a colossal waste of time — you still won.
Because it’s not about the outcome. It’s about the effort.
It’s about putting in the time.
Then do it again tomorrow. Another fifteen minutes.
I can’t tell you when the good stuff will start to happen, but I can guarantee this: God rewards showing up. He can work with consistency. When you’re consistent, conversation from yesterday picks up where you left off. Sometimes it continues throughout the day, and suddenly you’re making St. Paul — Mr. “Pray Unceasingly” — proud.
Please know that not every day feels fruitful, even after you get the hang of it. Sometimes God delivers an abundance of grace quietly, on the days that feel dry as a bone, but you showed up anyway.
Don’t worry about the outcome. Focus on the effort.
Just decide on an amount of time. Then, be still.
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