Prayer is our opportunity to walk up to God and say, “Hold me.”
We all have that friend. You know, the one you can ask the simplest question and two hours later they are still talking. Sometimes you want to grab them by the collar and say, “Get to the point!”
I know God loves it when we come to him and speak with him. There are many Scripture references where we are called to draw near, to lift our cries to our Father, cast our cares on him.
But sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t look at us as we are praying and want to yell, “Get to the point!” because ultimately, the point of prayer isn’t the words we speak, but instead the connection that is created.
Matthew 6:6-8 is a reminder of this… “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
When Jesus was teaching his disciples to pray he basically looked at them and said, “Look, God already knows. So how about we skip the small talk and jump straight to the deeper connection.” He even says not to keep rambling because you feel like you should, but instead get to the point. Connect with God.
A phrase that has been repeated through our Amen series has been, “Prayer is the heart of a child interacting with trust and faith in the heart of a Father through the gift of a Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
There are so many moments to cherish with children. Sure it’s great when they go on their breathless, excited description of the crazy moment that happened in school earlier in the day. But those we cherish most are when they simply walk up and ask to be held, those moments together on the couch wrapped in a warm blanket. The heart to heart connection happening when no words are spoken.
This is what prayer is. Our opportunity to walk up to God and say, “Hold me.” Sometimes it’s “hold me” because we want to celebrate a great moment, other times it’s because we are going through the hardest moments we can imagine.
I want to encourage you this week to stop using prayer as an opportunity to tell God what is going on in life and instead use it as a time to just say, “hold me” and feel the heart-to-heart connection that happens without words.
