Earth, Heaven

It wasn’t a fist-shaking, jaw-thrusting rant at heaven. But I doubted the goodness of God.

It wasn’t a low opinion of him either, really. But I was praying, and I was praying words of the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy. Holy, said three times, speaks of the perfection, the perfect goodness, of God. When I reached the third holy, I was uneasy. I lofted a question to God: "Really?"

1. Mud everywhere.

In fairness to me, I see a lot of crap on a daily basis. It’s everywhere. And I even try to avert my eyes so I don’t see crap that I don’t have to see. I skip a lot of movies.

In my work as a lawyer, even among the best people of our (local) society, things aren’t right. There are people who eat delicious hors d’oeuvres in members-only country clubs while tuxedo-ed artists play soothing music on gleaming grand pianos. They have status and wealth that others envy. Their future comfort seems promised by stock portfolios and homes and overflowing bank accounts. They drive past sweating, food-stamp needing plastic-bottle pickers; they don't see them through the shiny windows of the air-conditioned, leather-seated luxury of their brilliantly engineered, valet-polished cars. Some are lawyers who use their tax-payer funded lawsuits to ruin lesser people, for no measurable benefit to society. They stand for the rest. If I were in their place, I would be them.

I look at them, and I look to God, and I say, "really"?

Not, of course, that I’m a jewel.

Maybe I’m like a man who has lived under months of rainfall. There’s mud in the streets, there’s mud on the sidewalks, there’s mud in the parking garages, and, when I go into my house, mud goes in with me. I can’t imagine a world without mud.

2. Cracking through clouds.

I forget what it’s like to jet away from a rainy climate. The ascent at the end of the runway presses you gently into your seat as the rain-soaked airport falls away, and soon you’re lost in clouds. Soon after that, you crack the sky above the clouds, and the brilliant sun shines down on you, and it shines back up from the layer of clouds below you. The brightness gladdens your spirit, and you gaze at mystic fields and fantastic towers of cloud-architecture that goes on forever.

3. Visions.

It’s good to remember people who have had spiritual cloud-cracking experiences.

Like Moses, who asked to see the glory of God. God allowed it, but he allowed Moses to see him only from behind; the glory of his face would have destroyed mortal Moses. Moses saw from a cleft of a rock.

Like righteous, ruined Job, who took his gripe to God. God gave him a vision of God's own glory. Amazed, Job covered his lip and took back his complaint. The fact that he covered his lip was significant. Lepers in Old Testament times, as they walked, had to cover their lip and call out "Unclean! Unclean!"

Like Isaiah the prophet, who was in the temple, and he saw God in heaven. God’s robe reached down and its hem filled the temple. The vision was overwhelming. ""Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" (Isaiah 6:5 (NRSV).)

Like Paul, who took beatings, whippings, stonings, ship-wreckings, starvation, exposure to harsh weather, imprisonment, ridicule, all for the sake of spreading the Kingdom of Heaven. But one day, he was carried up into the "third heaven". He "heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell." (2 Corinthians 12:4 (NRSV).)

Like the apostle John. He was at the end of his life, starving on the Island of Patmos. There, he had the glorious vision that is the book of Revelation. And part of what John saw was the worship and praise and honor of God that takes place in heaven.

4. On earth as it is in heaven.

It’s rare to break though the clouds as Moses, Job, Isaiah, Paul, John, and others did. At least, it’s rare to do it in that way. But we can praise our God, and then our thoughts and words accord with heaven. In heaven, all of present hardships and privations fade like a dream fades to one who wakes up.

On earth, we need better eyes. And when I say "we", I mean "I". I would like a dream like Jacob had, with angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth, and God next to me. I would like to wake up and say, like Jacob, "Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!" (Genesis 28:16 (NRSV).)

The seraphs that Isaiah saw cried this to each other: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." (NRSV.) It would be good to know the glory of God around us.

5. Prayer (by Reginald Heber):

     Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
     Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
     Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
     God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

     Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore thee,
     casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
     cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
     which wert, and art, and evermore shalt be.

     Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide thee,
     though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
     only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
     perfect in power, in love and purity.

     Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
     All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea.
     Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
     God in three persons, blessed Trinity.

Sleepless

I couldn’t sleep and I tried to get help. Narcotics had side effects that I hated. Marijuana, a blessing for many who are seriously ill, was for me a childish thing that I needed to put away.

So I learned that the Word is true: God gives sleep. (Psalm 127:2.)

1. Watches of the night.

I learned the truth of that when I learned that God also gives wakefulness. I would wake up in the night. I would wake, by my watch, exactly on the hour – 5:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m, and so forth. Coincidences exist, but I considered this coincidence to be too marvelous.

And I felt that God was waking me to worship. But at 3:00 a.m., I had other ideas. Instead of getting up and kneeling next to my bed, usually I would pray in my recumbent position. Soon I would be asleep again.

God was patient. In the meantime, I shared my nighttime wakefulness with a Bible-study group I attend. I shared my wonder about whether God was calling me to rise and pray. (I had convinced myself that this was an open question.) The leader of the group said that she believed that I already knew the answer to that question, and she was right. She suggested that I rise, pray, and go back to sleep. That became my habit, more or less. ("More or less" because I am made of clay; I try to be honest about that.)

This would happen for a while.

2. Peace.

But though God wants us to be awake, he also wants us to rest. I might be right or wrong, but sometimes when I wake at night, I believe that it is only my old enemy insomnia come to visit. I slip its grip without chemical help now.

I tend to pray. Usually, prayer gives me rest. But when it doesn’t, then at least I’ve prayed; I’ve communicated with my Lord, and I haven’t fretted about not sleeping.

3. Night prayers.

 Prayer at night for me is different from prayer in the morning or during the day. My mind is at least a little foggy. So rote prayers are a blessing in those times.

So I might say the Lord’s Prayer. ("Our Father, who art in heaven . . ..") I might say it slowly, focusing on each word as if each word were a bead to be rubbed between the fingers. Or I might say or sing (in my mind) a familiar hymn.

Lately, I’ve tried to memorize prayers that I find in the Bible. The book of Revelation has prayers said in heaven. I’ve memorized two, so that I might repeat them in unoccupied moments during the day, or in the night when I can’t sleep. One is this:

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. [Revelation 1:5-6 (NRSV).] Another:
Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered
   To receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honor and glory and blessing! [Revelation 5:12 (NRSV)(this is really a hymn).] Everyone is different. I’m reading from the journal of the amazing Frank Laubach. To him, as I understand him, the best prayer is prayer that asks God to direct your prayers, accompanied by a listening ear to hear that direction. I’ve done that, and I find that I pray more imaginatively, more freely, when I do. But I also find my efforts at rote prayers suitable, as exercises in praise, as praise is done in heaven, using words shaped by holy persons or heavenly beings.

4. What’s your experience?

Maybe other people are doing this, and they can add their own helpful experience to what I’ve written. Maybe this will be a blessing to people who find themselves awake at nighttime and tired in daytime.

5. Prayer.
"Sweet is the sleep of laborers . . .." Lord, teach us to us make good use of our time. In those cracks or chasms of time between busy-ness and hurry, and in sleepless times at night, let us be laborers in prayer, serving you with our thoughts and our words when we are not serving you with our actions. Amen.

Donkeys Like Us

Is Barack Obama arrogant? Yeah, probably.

Look. He rose from nothing; became the first African-American editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review; became a law professor at the highly-acclaimed University of Chicago School of Law; made millions from a best-selling memoir; became a U.S. Senator as a young man; and, against the odds, beat the Clinton machine and the Clinton money for the Democratic nomination for President. Then he took the most powerful office in the world.

Would a guy like that have a high opinion of himself?

Might.

1. The donkey.
 
But here’s the thing: arrogance isn’t the only thing about him. He’s also a loving family man; he’s a thoughtful policy wonk; he’s a serious Christian; he cares about the welfare of the humble; he reaches out to his adversaries (too much, say his critics on the left). He takes risks (Osama bin Laden).

Some people won’t acknowledge the bad in him. Some won’t acknowledge the good. Some believe good things about him that aren’t true. Some believe bad things that are lies.

But our political leaders, including Obama, aren’t cartoon villains, and they aren’t storybook heroes.

They’re complicated. Like you and like me.

As Martin Luther (I believe) said, A man is a donkey, sometimes ridden by God and sometimes by the devil.

2. The Word.

  Why don’t we get that?

We’re a nation dominated by Judeo-Christian traditions, a nation of people of The Book.

So we should.

The Bible is unlike other ancient texts of history and origins. It doesn’t photoshop our historical forbears; it doesn’t edit out all evidence of their sin and fault. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, the son of his old age, in obedience to God, such was his faith; but he also sent away his servant girl with his other son, by her, into the desert, where, but for God, they would have died.

Ten of the twelve patriarchs plotted to kill their brother, Joseph, but instead sold him into slavery to a passing caravan of foreigners.

David loved God with his whole heart; but in the book of Kings, he had sex with another man’s wife. And then, when she got pregnant, he killed the husband to hide his own fault.

By tradition, the apostle Peter asked to be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy to die as his Lord had died; but while Jesus was in custody before his own crucifixion, Peter denied him three times. When Jesus was arrested, all of his remaining disciples fled.

So the bedrock book of our culture is clear: people are complicated. They are capable of greatness and great love; the same people can be cruel or cowardly or foolish. This truth embraces the great men of our tradition.

3. A sports metaphor.

Why can't we see our leaders that way?

Sometimes we seem to think and speak about our leaders with the restraint and thoughtfulness of a sports fan chauvinistically shouting up his favorite team or putting down a rival team.

4. Myself, ridden by the devil.

And I have been guilty of this. When George W. Bush was president, I happily read Maureen Dowd’s book Bushworld. I gobbled down the delicious disparagements of our president. Ditto when I read Shrub by Molly Ivans.

And in these days, I've had the habit to spend thirty minutes four days a week watching John Stewart on The Daily Show as he hilariously explodes the hypocrisy of Republican leaders and conservative media.

5. Ridden by God.

But I’ve stopped.

I don’t watch The Daily Show anymore. I choose not to watch a man, however clever, put other people down.

I’ve tried to be disciplined about Republican leaders. I’ve written essays on the virtues of Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry, none of whom I could imagine voting for.

6. The Why of it.
 
If the Bible is believed, to see someone as complex is to see them as God sees them. Why shouldn’t we have the habit of seeing as God sees?

And to see someone as evil and only evil, to cherish our hatred of him or her, is sin. Is Jesus’s call to love our enemies a nice idea from a dreamer of dreams? Then, too, 1 John 4:20:

Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

7.  Practice.

I’m a man of faults and virtues. My friends and family likewise are men and women of faults and virtues. However hard, I try to know that about my adversaries and my enemies, too, when I take wisdom.

And I pray for those I oppose. Sometimes, I pray for opposing counsel in cases I have, even if I lean toward having a low opinion of them.

I think that the Minority Leader of the Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell, would harm the country for the sake of his ideology. I tend not to think highly of John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, but it’s easier for me to see him as complex than McConnell. But I pray for them by name every day, sometimes twice.

It’s easier to think of someone as reachable by God if they are complex, as opposed to evil. It’s easier to pray for someone whom you think is reachable by God.

And praying for persons in high positions, after all, is the will of God. (1 Timothy 2:1-2.)

Or we can do otherwise. It’s our choice. After all, we are complex creatures, sometimes ridden by God, sometimes by the devil.

A Prayer for American Christians

Father, pity your Christian children in America.
Have mercy upon us when don’t do your will.
Have sympathy when we don’t do what you tell us to do.
Do not punish us; be lavish with the gift of your Spirit.

We are not Christians because we are better than others.
We are Christians because you moved in our lives.
We are not virtuous because we were born virtuous.
Our virtue is a gift of your Spirit.

You teach us virtue.
You teach us, by Paul, that we must not boast.
You teach us, by Jesus, that we serve you when we serve the weak.
You teach us, by Jesus, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But we don’t love our neighbors as ourselves.
We may despise our neighbors, as if we could judge them.
We treat our Muslim neighbors badly.
We stop their architecture of worship.

Lord, I trust that you cherish our Muslim neighbors.
You are the Maker; you made us all.
An artist loves his art, and you love the work of you hand.
And Ishmael, like Isaac, was made by you.

Lord, precept by precept, day by day, etch your Word upon our hearts.
By your spirit, put your image upon our souls.
Teach us to love what you love, cherish what you cherish.
Teach us to cherish our Muslim neighbors as you cherish them.

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. [Isaiah 64:6.]

Have pity, Lord. Remember that we are leaves in the wind.

In Jesus’s name, Amen.

A Bad Morning for Worms.

It was a bad morning for worms.

I learned this as I looked out my bedroom’s picture window at birds flitting down onto the grass and plucking up their food.

I watched from my knees. I gazed out into my yard as I prayed.

I'm back to praying on my knees. I had gotten out of that habit. But then I was reading the book of Daniel; Daniel prayed on his knees, and Daniel was a great and beloved prophet. I read the book of Acts. Paul prayed on his knees, and Paul was a mighty apostle.

If a prophet and an apostle prayed on their knees, why shouldn’t I?

I had read long ago that your posture while you pray shapes your attitude in prayer. Kneeling humbles. And God is a great army, an irresistible force; it’s best to be humble and make peace with him while he’s on his way.

So I prayed on my knees, with my elbows on my bed, looking out at the birds getting their food free from God.

Some people pray as they drive. Or as they work. Sometimes that’s me. Kneeling isn’t an option. But such prayer is a blessing. Time on the road is better spent in prayer than in listening to some political pundit’s rant-of-the-day. Prayer is better than many of the businesses of life.

I pray in the mornings. Sometimes I rush through prayer, so to speak, because I have to start work by a certain time. Prayer on those days is a little like a checklist, with me remembering the people I have a habit of praying for:
- my kin
- my church (pastors and members)
- the unemployed
- the sick
- my clients in custody
- my clients generally
- people including my parents and grandparents who have died
- leaders in California and the nation
- judges in California and on the United States Supreme Court
- friends and colleagues
- and others.

Maybe one day, Jesus will answer all of my prayers; maybe he will be say that he’s pleased with the time I spent praying for others and for myself. In the meantime, some of my friends will think that all of this is silly. But as John Wimber used to say, "I’m a fool for Christ; who’s fool are you?"

Today I didn’t rush throgh prayers. This morning, I have no appointments or court appearances, so I could tarry. I could reflect on the people I prayed for; I could craft unique prayer-petitions. Maybe God helped me formulate these prayers.

And I could pause between petitions, and I could look with happiness and thanksgiving into the nature happening in my back yard. This may have been the gladdest, best time of my day today. Prayer is a blessing.

I have prayed for a friend of mine who is out of work. I recently learned that after thirteen months he found a job. So my prayer of petition turned into a prayer of thanksgiving.

As I prayed, I remembered how grandiose I was as a young man, filled with hope of a brilliant career. I still have grandiose fantasies; I try to keep them in check. Today I prayed that I might have a life, small in scope, in which God does good through me every day. If that happens, I have reason to be grateful beyond measure. After all, didn’t Paul say that God’s power is made perfect in weakness?

Before I prayed, I read the Bible. This morning it was Hosea. I’m making my way through the Bible again. Sometimes what I read before I pray shapes my prayers.

Tonight I will read in 1^st Corinthians before I pray. Night is dicey. Sometimes I fall asleep as I read the Bible, and it doesn’t necessarily matter what time I start to read. Sometimes I’m too tired to pray. So morning prayer is important, because I don’t have those problems in the morning.

I’m off to get some exercise now, and then to work. While I work out, and during the day, I may talk to God. This also is a blessing and a gift. It’s God’s grace to me, for which I need always to be grateful.

Prayer and War on the Korean Peninsula

Kim Jong Un is a third-generation dictator of North Korea. He makes me think of that saying: The first generation earns; the second generation learns; the third generation burns. Mr. Kim's privileged upbringing might make him wildly detached from reality. And dangerously likely to bring burning to his corner of the word.

1. Danger.

The news magazine The Economist says this:

Even by its own aggressive standards, North Korea’s actions over the past couple of weeks have been extraordinary. Kim Jong Un, the country’s young dictator, has threatened the United States with nuclear Armageddon, promising to rain missiles on mainland America and military bases in Hawaii and Guam; declared a "state of war" with South Korea; announced that he would restart a plutonium-producing reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear site, while enriching uranium to build more nuclear weapons; and barred South Korean managers from entering the Kaesong industrial complex, almost the only instance of North-South co-operation. All this comes after the regime set off a nuclear test, its third, in February. Tensions are the worst on the peninsula since 1994, when North Korea and America were a hair’s breadth from war.
Things easily could get out-of-hand. What might a delusional upstart do with a fanatical million-man army and artillery trained on populous Seoul, the capital city of South Korea? There’s no telling.

We can’t control a tyrant who might be seduced by megalomania into mass murder. But we can do our part. Because war on the Korean peninsula would spread death and suffering deep and wide, time spent in prayer is time well spent.

2. The first prayer: guidance.

How do you pray against a Korean holocaust? Do you pray for removal of the agent of danger? God could do that. Do you pray for his temperance? God could do that, too.

But maybe the first thing to do is to ask God what to pray for and hope in his prayer-guidance. Maybe prayer begins with listening for the still, quiet voice of the Holy Spirit, perhaps a mental hesitation that says, "Not that way; this way." Prayers are more potent when they petition for the will of God to be done. I don't doubt that God can direct our prayers according to his will.

3. The second prayer: raising an army.

It’s an old joke that if you are given three wishes, the first thing you should wish for is more wishes. But maybe that works in prayer.

When I pray for Barack Obama, I often pray for God to raise up more people to pray for him, for his wisdom, and for protection for him and for his family. And, you know? After I had prayed that for some time, after the 2012 election, conservative Evangelical-leader Franklin Graham publicly called for Evangelicals to pray for their president.

Did I have anything to do with that? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not alone; maybe God chose to hear my prayers combined with the prayers of many others and did, in fact, raise an Evangelical army of pray-ors for the president.

So pray for God to stir other people to pray, so that blood won’t be poured out on the Korean peninsula.

3. The third prayer: blessings.

Maybe God will have directed your prayers in one way or another. If so, good. But if you do not feel otherwise guided, what harm can come if you pray for blessings?

Pray for peace.

Pray for the one-to-two-hundred thousand political prisoners who suffer in cruel conditions in Korean concentration camps.

And for the millions of farmers groaning in hopeless labor on collective farms in communist Korea.

Pray for light to come to the dark place that is North Korea. Pray for the North Korean people, for their freedom of self-determination, their freedom of mind, their freedom of speech, and their freedom of worship. They are a people severely oppressed. It's a crime in North Korea to sing any song that doesn't extol its leader.

Pray for safety, prosperity, and godliness for the people of South Korea.

It seems right to pray for blessings for a people, more than to pray for harm to any person, however odious and cruel that person might be. I would rather intercede for blessing than judgment.

5. The fourth prayer: guidance.

I suggested that this cycle of prayer begin with a prayer for guidance. Perhaps it should end, also, with a prayer for guidance – guidance for leaders who must make choices about the turmoil on the Korean peninsula, and about the turmoil in the world caused by that.

Pray for the president, and for his military leaders, and for the intelligence community, and for everybody in the American government who will shape policy about North Korea and South Korea. Pray for them to be guided by wisdom and discernment.

Pray for the leaders of other nation, that there may be harmony among nations and wisdom in the preservation of peace on the Korean peninsula. And, beyond the present foment, pray that the nations will be wise toward each other, and toward North Korea, and compassionate toward the North Korean people.

Pray that they will be compassionate, as I believe that God yearns to show his compassion, and as you are compassionate by praying for the welfare of a people that you do not know.

If you choose to take up this burden of prayer, I hope that God blesses you in it.

Sleeping through Prayer

There was a time when I could not pray. That time is over now. I hope it will be over forever.

But prayer is not always easy.

This is my routine: generally, I pray twice a day – morning and night. I start by reading the Bible. I read the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament at night. What I read in the Bible often shapes my prayers.

But here’s the problem: at night, I often fall asleep. Sometimes I fall asleep as I read the Bible; sometimes I fall asleep before I start to pray or as I pray.

"Ah", my wise friends will say. "Don’t wait until you’re tired. Turn off Facebook, and pray early in the evening."

Good advice. Thank you, wise friends. But I follow that advice already. It doesn’t matter if I bring myself before God at 7:00 p.m. or 9:30 p.m.. Still, I fall asleep.

There are things I can do. I've learned that if I fast for a day or so, I can have the diligence in study and prayer that I want. At least for a time. When I was young, I used to fast on a weekly basis. But that didn’t make me closer to God. Now, I don’t plan to fast, Pharisee-like, on a regular basis. Now, it’s as-needed. It can sharpen me.

If others benefit from routine fasting, I praise their habit. But the sharpness that I get from irregular fasting is the only reason that I do it. I don’t like to fast. I am a reluctant fast-er.

But last time I fasted, it worked only for about a day. Then I was back to sleep in the evening when I wanted to spend time with God.

This is like Peter and other disciples when Jesus wanted them to pray with him in the garden of Gesthemane. They couldn’t stay awake, and neither can I. I only mention that to show that there is a Biblical precedent for sleeping when it’s time to pray; I don’t compare myself to any apostle, except in their spiritual frailty.

Often, study and prayer still happen. If I fall asleep at 7:00 p.m., I generally wake around midnight. Since I have to do something, I generally take up my study and prayer where I was when I gave up earlier in the evening, shut of the light, and rolled over on my side. Then, time well spent, I go back to sleep.

Why I Pray

1. Without hope.

For over a decade, I believed that I was lost to God. I won’t describe the whole reason for that. But one sliver of the reason was that a voice without a body told me that I was going to hell.

I’ve had a history of hearing voices, and in past decades I was hospitalized for a disorder of the mind that relates to hearing voices. But now that I’m in my right mind, one of the puzzles of my life has been to sort my experiences from when I was homeless and fleeing a vast satanic conspiracy. I put my supernatural experiences from that time into piles. I try to discern what was from God, what was from madness, and what was from evil.

Even as that voice shattered me, I didn’t believe that it came from God; I believed that it was demonic. But I believed that voice because what it said mirrored the upheaval that I had at that moment experienced for weeks and months, and it matched what I saw about myself as I looked back at my life.

In the years after I heard that demonic voice, I would sometimes dream that God had forgiven me, and that he had welcomed me into his good grace. In those dreams I was overjoyed. Nothing else in my life has made me that happy. But then I would wake up, and I would not believe the dream. I groaned under the weight of that hopelessness.

For most of this decade-plus of heaviness, I could not bear to read the Bible in any depth. I could not bear to step inside a church. I could not pray; prayer felt like trespassing.

2. Hopeful.

Within the last two years, I’ve taken steps back to hope. The journey back started with loneliness: I wanted to date. My computer dating service seemed to match me up with Christians. This was a problem. One beautiful woman rejected me after I explained to her my dismal beliefs about myself. I had to confess them to her. I couldn’t build a relationship on pretense about who I was.

I started going to a church so that at least I wouldn’t have to explain to these Christian women why I was un-churched. The teaching at that church was almost always very good, and it got me re-interested in scripture. At first, my reading was topical – I would search the Bible on a topic when the teaching had provoked my curiosity about it. Eventually, I started reading the Bible more methodically. I started reading it to read every book from Genesis to Revelation, as I’d done several times when I was young.

In the meantime, I changed churches. The change came with a blessing.

In my new church, which is Episcopalian, we celebrate communion every Sunday. For months, I didn’t take communion. This was because I remembered reading that it is a poor idea to take communion when you aren’t right with God. And I still felt outside of God’s grace.

But that changed. The story of the prodigal son affected me. I came to believe that I was the prodigal son. I was a man who had squandered God’s blessings and God’s gifts, but, like the prodigal, I came to my senses and made the long journey home. I believed that I could be welcomed back like the prodigal.

One Sunday, I went forward to take communion. When I returned to my pew, I had something like a vision. Looking up at the architecture of the church, I had a sense of its alive-ness – its alive-ness through generations of believers who had worshiped there and in the wider Episcopalian church, of whom I was now a part. I strain to put into words a vision-like experience that came without words.

I’ve described the moment when I heard a voice that convinced me that I was lost. The lead-up to that voice was long, and it came like pronouncement of guilt and sentence after trial. The lead-up to my vision-like experience that caused me to believe in God’s mercy toward me also was long. But it was like a verdict of acquittal.

3.  Hope, not assurance.

I don’t believe that my salvation is a sure thing. I accept what the apostle Peter says, that salvation is something that we grow into. (1 Peter 2:2.) This is not the teaching of my former church; it is not mainstream in modern America. But it accords with my reading of the Bible, and it’s supported by other reasons personal to me.

4. The fruit of hope.

Sometimes I marvel that I don’t rejoice more for having the belief in sure damnation lifted from me. And it’s true that, intellectually, I realize that any trauma that I might suffer will be more bearable because of my new hope. This has yet to be tested by adversity.

But my spiritual life now flows as if a dam has burst. I have zeal in my spiritual life – the zeal of someone who thought that he was lost to God, but who has discovered unexpectedly that that isn’t so.

I study the Bible at length. I read, generally, twelve chapters a day.

And I pray. I think that I pray a lot by most standards.

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God is an excellent study of the admirable Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church. Author and anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann tells that Vineyard members are encouraged to pray for at least half-an-hour every day. Some do, some don’t. Some pray more. Prof. Luhrmann describes a woman who is admired for her ability in prayer; that woman prays for three hours a day.

At first, I would interleave my prayer with my Bible study: read a chapter, then pray for five minutes or so, then read another chapter, etc.

Now I study the Bible and pray in discrete chunks of time. I read three chapters in the morning, and then pray for half-an-hour. I read nine chapters at night, and then pray for an hour to an hour-and-a-half. My evening goal is an hour; usually I go longer.

This hasn’t been going on for very long, but already I sense changes.

Some changes are physical. At first, I prayed largely in my chair. I couldn’t bear to kneel for the whole time of prayer. My legs couldn’t take it. They can now. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve learned to shift kneeling positions. Another reason is that my knees and ligaments and ankles have better stamina from practice.

Some changes are changes to how I pray. I’m learning. I used to check my watch often to see how long I had prayed and how long I had left to reach my goal. (And I said "sorry" to God for watching the clock in the middle of this manifestation of his grace to me – the fact that I could pray.) I watch the clock much less now. (Sometimes I still apologize when I do.)

I learned about ACTS from Prof. Luhrmann’s book. ACTS stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Some teachers teach that those are the four components of prayer. At one time, I tried to divide my time of prayer into four chunks devoted to each of those categories. I still use ACTS, but flexibly. I go among those elements in my time of prayer.

Lately, the C in ACTS has also meant Conversation. I talk to God about things that happened during the day and about parts of the Bible that I don’t get.

Sometimes, the S stands for Silence. I wait in silence for some guidance from God about what to pray for and how to pray. This time of silence is normally brief.

Sometimes I remember hymns in my heart as I pay. Sometimes I sing them out loud.

Sometimes, I pray the same prayers that I have prayed before, pretty much in the same way. More recently, I worship God and pray in new ways for my church, my president, my relatives, my friends, my clients, strangers, enemies, and myself. I pray for the living and the dead.

Bible study is important to my prayers. The Bible gives me ideas about what to pray and how to pray.

5. Gratitude.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve known hopelessness; this new hope is God’s grace, and it is a wonder.

I can look back on my lost years and see God’s grace in them. They have made me more grateful and they have grown my faith and my knowledge of God.

James 4:8 says "Come near to God and he will come near to you." (NIV) In Sunday worship and in my private devotions, I strive to come near to God, trusting that he will come near to me.

A Non-Partisan Prayer for Victory in the Presidential Election

Lord,

1.
Let the one win this election who loves you better,
Let the one win this election who needs you more.
Let the one win this election who hears you better,
Let the one win this election who obeys you more.

2.
Let the one win this election who is more humble.
Let the one win this election who is more truthful.
Let the one win this election who will be guided by you.
Let the one win this election who honors you in his heart.

　
3.
Let the one win this election who will do best for this country and for the people in it.
Let the one win this election who loves us more.
Let the one win this election who is wiser.
Let the one win this election who does not trust in his wisdom.

4.
Let your hand be upon the winner,
To guide his stewardship of his office.
Give him generosity toward his opponents,
Empower him to unite us in common affection.

5.
Let your hand be upon the one who does not win,
To give him strength,
To accept your will in this election,
That your grace may be sufficient for him.

Guided to the Good God Wants

"Many Americans not only believe in God in some general way but experience God directly and report repeated contact with the supernatural." [T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012).]

 

1. One of many.

I claim to be among the "many" that Professor Luhrman talks about.

I don’t boast in this. It’s just a fact of my life. Communication with God is something that I’ve sought and obtained.

I share here what I believe to be a message from God personal to me. I share what was communicated, my grudging response to it, the after-effect of yielding to it. I cast about for the why of it. I discuss its importance to me.

This isn’t a Message to America. It isn’t an Oracle to the Human Race. The subject will seem ordinary.

Why God involves himself in the details of our lives, and in my life in particular, is a question that I won’t try to answer. I’ll just point to a question raised by a very flawed, very great man who loved God with his whole heart:

What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? [Psalm 8:4 (A Psalm of David) (NASB).]

 2. Jesus.

Jesus is above me as high as the moon is over the Mojave Desert.

But to be like him is my goal and the goal of any Christian. I won’t reach that goal while I walk this planet. Still, I want to do my best to imitate him and, to that end, I contemplate the closeness between Jesus and God.

Jesus submitted to God in all that he did. This is from the gospel of John:

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." [John 5:19 (NASB)].

Not only did he do what he saw his Father doing, he said what he heard his Father say:

Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. [John 14:10 (NASB).]

This relationship is evident, even if sometimes it’s not indicated in so many words. There’s a backstory to the account of the Greek woman who came to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter. Her daughter was possessed by an impure spirit. Jesus said to her, "Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs." (Mark 7:27 (NASB).)

After Jesus spoke, the Greek woman said back, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children’s crumbs." (Id., 7:28 (NASB).) For that answer, Jesus told her that her daughter was healed. The woman went home and her daughter was well.

Jesus was not cruel. He knew something from God, or God knew something and told Jesus what to say. Jesus said what he said to bring the woman to some realization, some repentance, perhaps some needed humility – Mark does say. But the existence of that backstory seems clear.

Nobody has ever had Jesus’s closeness with God. I’ve heard that prioress Hildegaard von Bingen longed to be a "feather on the breath of God", but I haven’t heard that she achieved that.

And that’s the human condition. For the most part, we’re left to ordinary resources for choices in our life.

3. My own choices

But sometimes God makes his will known. In a perfect world our response to God would be automatic. God commands, we obey.

To my shame, I have defied that perfect, four-word formula.

a. Marriage.

Twenty-some years ago, I believed that God directed me to marry a specific woman. I was praying. I asked God who I should marry. Immediately, the image of the face of a woman I knew came strongly upon me. The image came, I think, three times.

But I wanted to marry someone else. This other woman who I wanted to marry was smart, charming, beautiful, and professionally accomplished. We had dated.

So I resented direction to marry somebody who wasn’t her.

So instead of pursuing the woman of the vision, I started to study about divine guidance. Frankly, I was hoping to alibi myself out of doing what I didn’t want to do; though, in my defense, I was not altogether insincere. I read, I consulted others. I could never bring myself to act on the apparent response to my question to God.

It’s good that I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted to marry. We often were not kind to each other – there was conflict. Also, she was smarter and emotionally stronger than I was. If I had married her, I would have become her satellite. She would have been unsatisfied with that, and I would have been unhappy because she was unhappy.

It’s a pity that I didn’t marry the woman of the vision. I can now see how it could have been a good marriage. But I didn’t think so at the time.

I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted, and I didn’t marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry. Decades of loneliness followed.

b. House.

Around the time that I was refusing to marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry, I bought a house in Pasadena. It was small but charming.

But before I signed the papers to buy the house, a very clear voice came to me at night. I saw the house in my mind’s eye, and I heard: "No!"

But bought it anyway, although with anxiety.

House prices soon plunged, and the house became a burden. I unloaded it at a substantial loss.

c. China.

Around that time, I happened to see an advertisement from a Christian service organization about short-term teaching assignments in China. I called to ask about those.

When they found out that I was a lawyer, they strongly urged me to go to China long-term. They wanted me to teach international business law. The idea was attractive. Work at the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office had become a great strain because of conflict with my supervisor.

But again there was a warning. I do not remember now the exact circumstances, but I remember a voice that said, "Stay home and take care of your father." Dad was old, and he was lonely after the death of my mother.

But I was fixated on doing the good that I wanted, not the good that God apparently wanted, so I went to China. I taught there for two years.

I have good memories of China. But my time there ended with dread, with a belief that I had been opportunistically blamed for injury to a pedestrian who had walked into the side of a moving bus. I was not responsible. But in my last months in China, I always believed that I was about to be arrested.

In the meantime, Dad came under the influence of a manipulative woman who labored to divide him from his sons.

Each choice that I made, about marriage, about buying a house, about going to China, came with consequences. In fact, I still suffer consequences of those choices. And I may be largely unaware of all of the consequences that flowed from those poor choices. I note in passing that within a few years after I came back from China, I was fleeing vast conspiracies and looking for places to sleep out of the wind in ditches, in orange groves, and under shrubbery next to freeways.

4. No swimming.

This history of disobedience and disaster informs my response to guidance that I think I have had recently.

I was swimming regularly. I had for years. The thought occurred to me that I should give up swimming. As I thought about this, I felt an inner weight, which I interpreted to be the Holy Spirit signaling that this was from God. This thought was persistent.

This thought was not welcome. Swimming is my exercise, my hobby, and my enjoyment. Swim meets are my avenue of physical competition. It makes me proud to swim well and to be strong and fit. It’s good for my appearance, and I’m so vain that I like to see my broad chest and shoulders as I shave in the morning. I have friends that I know through swimming. And, after all, doesn’t the Bible say "Physical training is of some value"? (1 Timothy 4:8 (NIV).)

I weighed what to do. I went through some of the classic stages of grief. There was denial – does God really want this? There was bargaining – God, what if I don’t swim or compete on Sundays; then is it OK?

5. Caution.

It’s right to be cautious about supernatural guidance. I have to approach supernatural guidance with special caution because I have been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic– or, more exactly, as having something like paranoid schizophrenia. I take medicine.

But that doesn’t make me automatically dismiss the idea that God might speak to me. My times dominated by that disease are marked, first, by paranoia. I suffer alarm about an apparent conspiracy to harm me. As the disease progresses, the conspiracy seems to grow, and my alarm deepens. Only then do the voices and visions come. I assume that if I were listening to disease and not to God, before that I would be in flight from a vast conspiracy.

And to acknowledge my disease is not to say that I can never be supernaturally guided. That would be like saying that because I have ringing in my ears, nobody ever presses my doorbell.

Yet I have had supernatural-seeming thoughts that turned out not to be from God. Once I was leaving my home, and I had a strong sense, not unlike the sense I had about swimming, that I would never return to it again. It’s from that home that I now write. I’ve also heard voices with more alarming messages that I now know were not from God.

So not every voice, not every supernatural-seeming thought, comes from disease; nor does it necessarily come from God. If a voice told me to harm someone, I would know that it came from something evil that had access to my mind.

6. Discernment.

So I had to decide whether this thought about swimming really came from God. I convinced myself that it did by driving into mountains, finding a quiet, shaded spot, and being alone to think.

For the most part in my hours in the mountains I did not address the immediate issue of swimming. I began by reading a few chapters of scripture. Then I worked on an essay about the fear of God. At the end of several hours, I felt peace and comfort about the idea of giving up swimming.

Maybe I’m wrong. That’s always possible, and it’s good to be humble about the possibility of making a mistake. But all you can ever do is what you think is right after giving the matter careful thought.

7. Why this has happened.

Naturally I have wondered why God apparently banned me from swimming.

"Why" questions with God are perilous. He often does not give us the "why" of what he wants. And compared to God each of us is like a pawn or a bishop or a knight on an infinitely large chess board. We see only what is immediately around us. God sees the whole board. So sometimes we just have to trust.

In the first chapter of Mark, Jesus heals a leper. He strictly tells the leper not to tell anyone about how he came to be healed. But in his enthusiasm, the one-time leper told everybody. It’s right, isn’t it, to give glory to God? But afterward, the throngs of people made it impossible for Jesus to minister in towns, according to Mark. After that Jesus’s ministry was for a time confined to the countryside. (Mark 1:40-45.)

So God has his reasons, which we might not know. But here are reasons that make sense to me.

It might have happened in answer to a prayer. Months ago, seeing how tottering was my walk with God, I asked him to "quicken" me. I meant "quicken" in the sense of changing me from passively religious to actively engaged with God and doing his will. And I often pray for wisdom.

And my exercise regimen has been spectacular, but my prayer-life and Bible-study have been comparatively grudging and meager. Maybe God wanted to shake things up.

And I think of Jesus and the rich young ruler. He came to Jesus and asked what he should do to gain eternal life. Jesus told him to obey the scriptural commandments. But he pressed Jesus. He said that he had done that from childhood. Then Jesus told him to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor; then he would have treasure in heaven. Then, Jesus said, the young man should follow him. (Luke 18:18-23.)

Maybe I am like the rich young ruler, without the wealth. I have no great wealth to give up. But I can surrender this thing, swimming, that is such an important part of my life. Maybe my swimming is the wealth that makes me stumble in my walk with God.

And, apart from all of that, maybe what I heard was just a sovereign choice by God.

8. Effect.

I notice things about myself now that I don’t swim. I’ve had a quickening of ideas. I’ve had flashes of love for strangers – wholly uncharacteristic of me. These might be breadcrumbs from God dropped in my way to lead me to know that I’ve done right.

And now that I’ve given up something costly, I’m less patient with my lax religious practices. When I waste time, It seems to me that I risk forfeiting any benefit that I might gain from my sacrifice.

It used to be that the first thing I would do on waking in the morning was go online. Lately, the first thing I do is read the Bible.

And before, at night, I typically put off reading the Bible until shortly before sleeping. But by then I was so tired that I retained almost nothing of what I read.

So giving up swimming has shifted my priorities and made me walk better with God.

9. Hard.

Giving up swimming has been hard in two ways. It’s hard to give up something that I love. Also, it’s hard to know that I’m rightly interpreting God’s will. I’m glad for these two difficulties.

The value of what I’ve given up increases the value of what I gave it up for. Think of Thomas Paine. Think of what he wrote in a time when the American revolution had suffered military setbacks in New York. Paine wrote these words in his booklet The Crisis:

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Giving up swimming is, in fact, a low price for a closer walk with God. But it is costly in my mind.

It’s also hard to know that I am not being fooled. But the fact that I struggle with this is some comfort.

Bryan Garner is a writing guru. He’s written many books, including two books he co-wrote with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I’ve heard Garner say that the difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer thinks writing’s hard; a bad writer thinks it's easy.

Maybe that’s true with spiritual things, too. So the fact that I wrestle with my apparent messages from heaven might be a good thing.

10. The limits of supernatural guidance.

I am mindful that by far most of what I do and think will continue to come from my own thoughts. I’m not Paul that I learn all of what I know of Jesus by direct revelation. I need to study my Bible. And when I work at my law practice, I have to look for the law, and I have to think hard, and I have to labor at my advocacy.

Yet even most of the time, I hope and believe that God, if he chooses, might be guiding me, even if that’s not apparent. It might be that God speaks to us through our own thoughts, but he speaks to us below the level of our awareness.

11. The limits of my sacrifice.

I chose to interpret this supernatural guidance narrowly: not to give up all exercise, but only swimming. I took up running. But I wrestle with whether I am called to give the guidance a broader interpretation and to sacrifice all exercise for the sake of gaining more focus on God.

12. The limits of my sanctity.

Communication with God doesn’t make me a saint. I don’t love as I should. I waste a lot of time that God has given me. I spend too much time arguing about politics. Even as I post a snarky comment about a politician, I know that it doesn’t make me grow closer to God.

I walk with God haltingly. I hope that God will make me his foot-soldier. My hope is not to be exalted but acceptable. For a man who spent a decade convinced that he was lost to God, this hope is spectacular.

I, Libertard.

I remember reading about a Union soldier and a Confederate soldier found dead after a Civil War battle. Each gripped the other, and each had thrust his knife into the other’s side. They lay together in death.

That epitomized the hatred in that conflict, a hatred still un-healed.

So. I was researching on the internet the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known to its detractors as "ObamaCare"). People have written things like, "This explanation is so simple that even a Republican can understand it." Or, "Send this to your libertard friends and watch their heads explode"– or something like that.

On Facebook, liberals and conservatives often hate on each other.

1. A house divided against itself.

Abraham Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." And he was quoting a higher authority. What Lincoln said was true then: hundreds of thousands died in a war to uphold a nation divided against itself.

An what he said is true now. In our hatred, we risk burning our abode. Some people hate the other party, or a particular person, such as Barack Obama, more than they love their country. They'd burn down their own house to kill their "enemy" in it.

For a scientific point of view, study Harvard professor Martin A. Nowak's article in the July 2012 Scientific American, called "Why We Help". Cooperation helps organisms survive.

2. Harming ourselves.

When we call someone a "libertard" or a "tyrant" or a "Republiscam" or a "fool" we muffle our own intelligence.

We could have a chicken-and-egg argument about whether movies and television dramas and popular fiction make us shallow, or whether producers make shallow entertainments because we are shallow. The fact is that it’s the rare movie or television drama that has a villain with any complexity.

Shows with complex characters become iconic. The Sopranos is an example. Tony Soprano was a thug. But he was a complex thug. He loved his family, and he was capable of kindness, for all his wrongful ways.

And that’s why Shakespeare endures. Nobody could read everything that has been written about Shakespeare and his plays, even if he spent a lifetime trying. When I lived in China, I knew a Chinese scholar who studied Shakespeare – not to teach, but to learn.

Shakespeare’s characters were complex, even the villains. Richard III is a rogue, but an interesting one. Macbeth murdered his king, but he is a human character with pathos.

The point is that when we summarize a person into a pejorative, like fool, we overlook richness and complexity in the personality of another human being. We make ourselves shallow when we regard others with small eyes.

And to those who care what God thinks, he is clear: hard judgments are a conduit to condemnation.

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. [Matthew 5:22 (NIV).]

3. The first step.

The first step to un-divide our house is not from those who do wrong; it’s from the wronged. It’s forgiveness.

I try. When I first saw it, I was burned by the term libertard. Hated it. I'm fine with it now.

Didn’t Jesus say that his kingdom was made for the simple, not the smart? Didn’t he say that who he was was for the simple to know? "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." (Matthew 11 (NIV).) Maybe if I'm a libertard, I'm simple enough to see God. So I forgive libertard.

The importance of fogiveness is a core christian  belief. "And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." (Mark 11.) This is a big idea that appears many places in the New Testament.

But to ground this piece in science, I'll refer again to Why We Help. That article discusses five distinct patterns of cooperation that favor an individual or group in evolution. One is called "direct reciprocity". On its basic level, it's tit-for-tat. One monkey grooms another so that the other monkey will groom him.

The author described the use of complex computer simulations to show how this kind of cooperation could evolve. Describing these computer-simulation results, he said:

What made our early computer simulations even more interesting was the revelation that there are different kinds of direct reciprocity. Within 20 generations the initial tit-for-tat strategy had given way to a more generous strategy in which players might still cooperate even if their rival defected. We had in essence, witnesses the evolution of forgiveness -- a direct-reciprocity strategy that allowed players to overlook the occasional mistake.

The last form of cooperation that the author described, which applies to "all manner of organisms, from amoebas to zebras", is the performance of "selfless acts for the greater good, as opposed to abetting a single peer."  No doubt forgiveness can be such an form of cooperation. It enhances group cohesion.

A happy confluence of science and religion exhaults forgiveness.

4. The second step.

The second step is to forebear from harsh words against people we disagree with. It divides the house against itself.

I say this fully aware of my own blog posts, such as "When Christians are Assholes." http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-christians-are-assholes.html I also remember blog posts that take down certain republican candidates. E.g.: http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2012/02/mitt-romney-up-tree.html And I have been happy to share on Facebook non-partisan fact-checker analysis that calls persons out for pants-on-fire political statements.

So you can call me hypocrite. I prefer complex.

Please remember that I have also called for prayers for Mitt Romney. http://www.justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2012/05/prayers-for-mitt-romney.html  And I wrote a post call Ten Things I Admire about Conservatives. Among others. http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2012/02/ten-things-i-admire-about-conservatives.html

5. The third step.

The third step is to pray for each other. Pray for blessings on people we oppose. Who knows? Maybe we will find it harder to find fault after that. Maybe that will be because God will change them. Or maybe God will change us.

Hope, Grudge, and Prayer

There is one who scatters, and yet increases all the more,

And there is one who withholds what is justly due, and yet it results only in want. [Proverbs 11:24 (NASB).]

1. Coming out of hopelessness.

For many years I thought that God had rejected me forever. I could not go to church. I could not read the Bible. When I tried to pray, I felt like I was trespassing.

This was the sin of hopelessness.

Things have changed. I go to church, and I read the Bible, and I pray. I do not share the modern American certainty of salvation, but I have a hope of Heaven.

The subject of this piece is prayer.

I pray several times a day. I regret the wasted years when I did not pray. But even before my years of alienation from God, I did not pray near enough.

2. Puzzling history.

When I was a young man, my mom confided in me that she had always prayed for me every day. This has been a lifelong blessing, even though she died long ago when she was about the age that I am now.

So why, when I practiced religion, didn’t I pray for my parents? That’s the merest thing that a son or daughter can do. I pray for them now, even though they are long dead. People always need prayers of the living, and, I think, always benefit from it.

3. The world’s wisdom and the foolishness of Christians.

The wisdom of the world says that prayer is an empty act. Claudius in Hamlet despaired that his prayers did not rise to Heaven, but clung flightlessly to Earth. Smart folk think that about all prayer. They think that prayers affect the world only as the flecks of spit from fervent supplicants moisten the air.

That is not the Christian concept. In The Book of Revelation, chapter 5, Jesus took a sealed scroll from the hand of God that only he could open. When he took the scroll, "the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people." (NIV.) The prayers of God’s people are incense in Heaven, saved by God for the right time.

4. Prayer evolution.

When I started to pray for people again, I prayed for my friends, for my family, for my church, and for my president. It wasn’t that long ago that I started to do that.

But now I pray for more people.

Here’s a secret about me. I hold grudges. Just yesterday, I was driving home from work and I remembered a judge who pounded me long ago. A prosecutor had subpoenaed my client’s medical records for a manslaughter/drunk driving case I was defending. She wanted me to agree that the jury could see those records, and she wanted me to agree to that before she unsealed the records.

I’m many things, but I don’t think that I’m stupid. I won’t agree to let records go to the jury before I actually look at those records and know what’s in them. There might be something in those records that hurts my client, and I might be able to keep that harmful stuff from the jury with a timely objection. But I won’t know that until I see what’s in the records. What the prosecutor wanted was ridiculous.

But when I refused, the prosecutor complained to the judge. And the judge was so angry at me that I thought that steam was going to geyser out of his ears. And in his anger he ruled against me on a pending motion on a silly technicality. He made it clear that he did this because of my lack of ethics in refusing to agree to let the jury see these records that I had in fact not looked at. He made it clear that he was teaching me a lesson.

As I remembered this incident, I invented a speech that I would have liked to have made to that judge. It would have lasted several minutes, and it would lacerated him with sarcasm. But slowly I realized that I was wrong to relish this speech that fortunately I had never made.

So instead I prayed for him. I prayed that he would have real wisdom as he performed his office. I hope that God answers that prayer, and I think that he will.

I hold a lot of grudges. That’s how I am. But now, as often as a grudge comes to mind, I use it as prompt to pray for God to bless the object of my grudge. Sometimes there’s a tug-of-war in my mind between fanning my grudge and praying it away.

And it’s not only these people that I pray for. As I said, I was blessed with a mom that prayed for me every day. But I know that some people have never been prayed for. So I’ve started to try to think of people who might never have had someone to pray for them, and I step up.

5. Scattering and increase.

Make no mistake. I pray more than I did, but I am far far away from praying without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5.)

But I’m grateful for the time I spend in prayer. That brings me back to the quotation at the start of this piece, Proverbs 11:24:

There is one who scatters, and yet increases all the more,

And there is one who withholds what is justly due, and yet it results only in want.

I scatter my prayers; I hope that these scattered prayers will increase the spirit of God in me.

Prayers for Mitt Romney

I’m a sinner. I mean that sincerely. I won’t elaborate.

But a few days ago, I had a worthy thought. I decided to pray for a man I oppose: Mitt Romney. He’s a sinner, like me. It’s right that I pray for him.

I also pray for Barack Obama. What I said about Romney and me is also true of Obama.

I pray for Obama more than I pray for Romney. But I pray for both of them. And I pray for their families.

This is for my friends who are believers: will you join me in praying for these two men and their families? Maybe you already do. And, whoever wins in November, will you continue to pray for the winner (and the loser)?

No person has the wisdom and the knowledge and the humility that it takes to preside over America. Whoever occupies the White House needs our prayers.

1. The "why".

And maybe the prayers that we don’t want to pray are more fragrant to God than the prayers that we are eager to pray. Who knows? In praying for our enemies, maybe we are helping ourselves.

In this, we would follow a man greater than any of us, who suffered more from authorities than any of us ever will. Five times he was flogged with forty lashes less one. His back from neck to waist must have been all scar tissue. He was also beaten and imprisoned (often). But his is what he told his disciple Timothy (1 Tim 2:1-32 (NRSV)):

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.

This, of course, was the apostle Paul.

2. Suggestions for prayer.

I suggest praying for leaders the things that we ourselves need: wisdom, humility, strength. Especially wisdom. Wisdom is keenly needed.

Many remember that that was the quality that Solomon prayed for himself. God came to Solomon and told him to ask for what God should give to him. Solomon said:

Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great? (2 Chron 1:10 (KJV).)

God gave him that, and more.

How can we possibly do wrong by praying for wisdom for somebody? And godliness? Even for our enemies? (To be clear: I don’t think Romney is my "enemy". But I oppose him in this election.)

3. Imprecatory prayers (curses).

There is deep wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. I acknowledge that, and I admit that there are prayers of harm in it ("imprecatory" prayers). King David, for example, was pursued by his usurping son. He prayed that his son’s wise counselor would be confounded. He prayed: "O LORD, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness." (2 Samuel 15:31.)

If I’ve moved anyone to pray like that, I’ve done more harm than good. I will only say that if we want mercy from God, we should show mercy to others. Who among us doesn’t need mercy from God? A prayer of hatred is a somber thing, and nobody should undertake it with giddy pleasure. But that’s between every person who so prays and God.

4. Praying for ourselves and each other.

In praying for wisdom for our leaders, we might remember to pray for wisdom for ourselves and for each other. And for a spirit willing to submit to that wisdom.

The other thing that lately I have prayed for myself is humility. Pride, I now know, has been my lifelong adversary. And vanity. And conceit. They always tug at me.

So I try to think of the men that Jesus spoke of: one prayed thanks that he wasn’t like the sinner next to him. The sinner next to him prayed for mercy. The story is worth quoting:

And [Jesus] spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. [Luke 18:9-14 (KJV).]

God save you and me from pride. God grant us the gift of a broken spirit.

5. Closing prayers.

God bless Mitt Romney with wisdom and godliness and a humble spirit. God bless him and protect him and also his family.

God bless Barack Obama with wisdom and godliness and a humble spirit. God bless him and protect him and also his family.

God in the Classroom: A Manifesto

Sshhh! Let’s conspire.

People complain that the Supreme Court banned God from the classroom in the 1963 case Murray v. Curlett. But there’s a way to get him back.

It’s real simple. It’s real subversive.

See, God dwells in the hearts of those who love and fear him.

See where I’m going with this?

So it’s simple. In our homes, in our churches, teach our children to love and fear God. Then send our children to school. When our children enter school, God goes in with them, carried in their hearts.

It’s so simple!

The problem is that people sometimes talk like we need teachers to lead Christian prayers and read the Bible in classrooms, in front of students who are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and agnostic. That, apparently, will install God in the hearts of the students, so the students can carry God back to their homes and churches.

But these people, in their complaints, have it all backward. It’s supposed to work the other way around.

True, my plan has at least two problems. The first problem is that it takes effort by parents and pastors. Because to really, really work, this plan demands that children learn to be little Christs. To really, really work, our Christian children must go into schools and act in a way that the non-Christians see a difference in them that they want for themselves.

And that calls for discipleship. That calls for study, prayer, and meditation – by the parents, by the pastors first, then by the children.

That’s because Christlikeness does not arise in the lazy Christianity that glories in being saved but makes no effort to deepen a relationship with the saver. That relationship – like any good relationship – demands time. And it demands time from the parent and the pastor before they can reproduce it in the children.

And here’s the second problem: the success of this plan is not guaranteed by the efforts that parents and pastors make. This Christian Normandy Invasion of the classroom is no more guaranteed to succeed by our efforts than that other Normandy Invasion. There’s something else that this plan requires, and it’s something that we have no control over.

That’s grace.

Study, prayer, and meditation don’t automatically lead to Christlikeness. Online, you can listen to sermons from the Westboro Baptist Church (they who celebrate the deaths of our soldiers). They know their Bible. They know it well. They just have a flawed understanding of it. It defies my understanding of the in-dwelling Christ to say that Christ dwells in them.

The South went to war against the Union to preserve the institution that permitted them to eat their bread by the sweat of other men’s faces – Black men’s faces. They were a praying, preaching, Bible-reading people.

The overwhelming majority of Germans were Christians. But they followed Hitler into World War II and the Holocaust.

So study, prayer, and meditation lead to spiritual wastelands without the grace of God. And nobody can make God give grace.

But nobody can stop us from praying for grace.

So pray for grace, for yourselves and for your children. Then study, meditate, and continue to pray, and teach your children to do likewise.

Then nothing but God himself can keep God out of our schools.