Prayer is so much more than talking to God. It’s a factor in practicing the presence of God.

I woke up this morning with the stress I’m dealing with, but the habit I created last night continued. We came in from work, and I put my phone down not to pick it up again except to set my alarm for this morning. I did not pick up my phone this morning except to charge it, and I sat here on the sofa where I type these thoughts with a second cup of coffee.

During my first cup of coffee I began quoting a Scripture I’ve had memorized since 1992, and it washed over me in 2019 as much if not more than it did in 1992. You see, a day is a thousand years to God, and a thousand years is a day to my Father. The fears and worries of 1992 were calmed the same way the present day fears and worries are being calmed as I write. His presence is not a cosmic Santa Claus making sure I’m spotless without sin because that’s impossible. As I wrote in my last post I strive not to sin, but alas I do, and it’s the presence of the Spirit that reminds me the blood of Christ is a filter the Father looks through to see me. The blood and resurrection continually remind me in my prisons that I am free, guilt removed and empowered beyond my darkest fear.

March Madness is upon us here in North America. Many college teams are striving to win the basketball games they are playing, but obviously some are losing. There is a huge difference when I team goes out to play to try to win, rather than develop an attitude of not trying to lose.

Prayer enables me to exit my house with an attitude of winning. Sin drives me into an attitude of losing because, like Adam and Eve, my disobedience drives me into hiding. Shame, guilt, anger, demands that others do what I command them to do and fear are anchors that Satan uses to paralyze lovers of God from productivity.

Satan set in motion a cancer long ago that not only kills the human race, but it occupies the winning activity that prayer can produce. The Father is longing for awakenings like this because He knows the deception Satan is capable of. When the thoughts of inadequacy and shame dance through a believer’s mind the radiation and chemo therapy the Father offers do not work on the cancerous cells. Lies are cancerous cells Satan multiplies, and prayer is the radiation we must use day after day to extinguish them.

There are those who claim that if there is a God, and He is good why does He allow evil to persist? I’ll never have an answer for that, but I don’t need to because I’ve seen what the presence of an all loving Father can do in the presence of unspeakable evil. He delivers. He rescues people from death. He saves from oppressive dictatorships. He restores those rejected and ridiculed by their biological parents, and He makes the poor rich.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus is still performing signs of His presence, and one day evil will have it’s last hurrah, and prayer will be a face to face conversation with the One who knit us together in our mother’s wombs.