Psalm 30:2

AMP – O Lord my God, I cried to You for help, and You have healed me.

NRSVUE – O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.

VOICE – Eternal One, my True God, I cried out to You for help; You mended the shattered pieces of my life.

God Responds to Our Cries

The psalmist has a personal relationship with God, showing that he has personal faith and trust in God. Crying out to God shows that you are relying on God in moments of stress. It’s a genuine plea, showing how desperate he is and that his faith in God is the only way that he can get out of the stress. God hears and responds to the prayer of His children. Healing describes the restoration we receive both physically and spiritually. This happens because God is compassionate and merciful, and is shown through our salvation.

REFLECTION CHECKPOINT: Have you ever prayed to God and felt like you were ignored? What situation brought that up and how did you work through that feeling?

Realness of a Prayer Life

Prayer is a vital way to seek God’s intervention in our lives. Prayer is also one of the weakest areas of my Christian walk with God. Why? It boils down to recognizing that my stressful moments makes me focus on what I can and can’t control, instead of giving it to God. It’s also the abstract awkwardness of talking to someone that isn’t present, even thought I recognize that God is always with us. It’s also the awkward sharing of saying that I got through my stress as a result of God.

When I’m stressed, God is one of the last things I think about. My mind focuses on survival when I’m stressed. Often when I’m in moments of stress, I focus on how I can get through the stress, taking it moment by moment. The struggle with this is that my focus is on my hypervigilence. Instead of focusing on living in the moment, I tend to focus on living in spaces where I constantly reflect on the past and figure out how I can best survive in the future. It’s tiring. It’s draining. It’s stressful. Obviously, it’s the best time for me to dump all the information to God and let God guide my feet and direct my path. There’s a disconnect in my mind to immediately stop and share with God. There is more that can be explored with how my brain is trained on flight-or-flight responses instead of creating responses based on mindfulness.

The other parts of why I struggle with prayer is I think a growth and maturity aspect that I haven’t fully investigated. As I mentioned, I have struggled with moments of creating a space to intentionally talk to God. There is the inherent mindset of creating an intentional space, in a mindful environment, with the appropriate tools so that I can communicate with God. There’s part of me that hasn’t released that mindset that there is a “required” form to communicate with God. When I was working in a church, it was easier to have these moments because the environments were always right in my mind. I would sneak away to the sanctuary and chill around the altar to talk with God, finding those moments that were quiet and secluded away from the chaos of the outside world. Realizing it now, it was much like Jesus so went away from the chaos of life to rest and recharge. However, in my current everyday life, I don’t feel like I have that space to seclude myself. My life is, in a relatively unfortunate sense, chronically online. Most of my friends are friends that I have made online. My work through this blog and related social media work is online. I live with my family, so finding a space that is just mine, outside of my room, is difficult. Now, please don’t hear this wrong. I am incredibly grateful, thankful, and blessed for the life I do have. While I know I need to work on some things to create changes that I want to see, I am incredibly blessed to get to do this as a hobby, have many wonderful friends, loving parents and family members, and a place that is my own (my bedroom.) These things are not a given for a lot of people, so I do not and try not take them for granted. However, I don’t have a space separated from what I consider my daily life. If I’m not at my desk, I’m in bed. If I am not in bed, I’m at my desk. There’s not an in-between setting for and I do struggle with that. The thing that I want everyone to walk away with in this conversation is the same thing that I learned a while ago: God’s ready to hear you no matter where you are, what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it. Jesus broke the barrier that separated us from God. God wants us to come to Him at any point, boldly and confidently, and share everything that’s on our hearts, good and bad, with Him. There doesn’t need to be a ritual. There doesn’t need to be a performative aspect to it. It doesn’t need to be social media, Instagram ready. It needs to be real, authentic, and genuine. God would rather hear multiple small conversations from you than one long conversation, and I believe and embrace that.

REFLECTION CHECKPOINT: Look at your relationship with God and how prayer has effected it. Does your prayer practices need to be simplified or be re-imagined so that it is more sustainable for you?