If I knew the answer to that one, I could write a book, become famous …

Bill Hybels did it, in 1988, when no-one had heard of Bill Hybels or Willowcreek.  “Too Busy not to Pray”.  I was a student at the time.  And I was too busy to read the book.  It still sits on my bookshelf, mostly unread.  Too busy to read the book, we joked at the time.  And too busy to pray, we often still say.

“Prayer takes time” says Bill Hybels, “and we are so busy!”.  Time and prayer.  We link them together, but somehow prayer rarely gets time.

But here is something I have learnt this summer:  time is never the reason we don’t pray.  Maybe I should soften that slightly: time is rarely the reason we don’t pray.  There may be the odd day, when we really don’t have a moment.  But I suggest these days are odd.  They aren’t the norm.  My point still stands.  Time is rarely the issue.  It is a convenient excuse.

The issue is desire.

You may think you know what I am going to say now.  Our desires are wrong.  We need to stifle our desire to watch TV, read magazines, check facebook, or read blogs, so that we all pray more.  Or that we all need to desire Jesus more, to conjure up some passion for the Lord.

Well actually no.  This Sunday, at Community Church, I will suggest that we don’t trust our desires enough, let them out, let them loose, let them run wild and see where they take us.  I think they might just lead us to prayer…

PS. If you want to do some reading beforehand, you could read a very familiar story in Lk 10 38-42

I will try to write something more on this over the coming weeks, but here is a talk that I gave at our church before Christmas on times when God seems absent in our lives. God is never absent, but there are times when it seems as though He has left us; times when when we seem to praying to the ceiling; when all we hear is silence; when we have no sense of God’s presence. We are in a barren place, which can become a place of incredible fruitfulness, if we know how to walk with God in these seasons. Often we think we have done something wrong or we try to go back and do what we were doing in times of blessings. We can be tempted to give up. But if we can discern the “withness” of God, that God is with us in a unique, but different, way, we can learn to love the desert. And find it a place of transformation.

Intrigued? Well listen, and let me know what you think.

Living in the desert – Talk 4.mp3