[Tuesday's Devotional] - God on mute

Without doubt my book of the summer has been God on Mute by Peter Greig. I have set the book title up as a hyperlink in case you want to get your own and I recommend that you do so. The book comes highly recommended by the great and the good as it well deserves. Peter is a founder of the 24/7 prayer movement and is director of prayer at Holy Trinity Brompton. Prayer is his business.

God on Mute addresses the issue of unanswered prayer. Greig writes openly and honestly from his own experience, and the backdrop to the whole book is his wife's illness. Initially she suffered with a brain tumour and then, after a successful surgical removal, has had to live with the epilepsy that the tumour left her with. Over the next couple of days I want to share some of my reflections on what the book has taught me, but today I want to make one simple point: Prayer does not need to be pretty to be real prayer. Greig talks about his response when he and his wife learned that she was suffering with a brain tumour. He admits that during this trauma his prayers were not, to put it mildly, as faith filled as he would want them to be. He states that he prayed "at best like a child and at worst like a charlatan looking for snake oil". This great man of prayer, praying like a child, yelling out to God. Doesn't that make you feel better about having a prayer life that is not everything you want it to be? The point is, I think, that it is OK to be real with God and to bring yourself as you are to him. Greig is honest about the way that the fear and the pain changed his way of relating to God and also about the sinful desires that the fear stirred up in him. However, his great strength is that he kept on praying. He kept on praying throughout the whole situation. He kept on bringing himself before his heavenly father. Sometimes it is all we can do to pray and the last thing that we should stop doing is praying.

I remember as a very young man sitting on a wooden bench in a roofless monastic meeting area listening to the late, great, Brother Roger of Taize, The part of his message that I have always carried with me is that we should never worry about how we pray. He was right, of course, what matters is that we do pray.

For prayer

Spend time being real with God.

John Martin-Jones