40 Days - Day 11

Ever been without your cell phone? Say you were out one day, texting yourself into oblivion, and then the unthinkable happens-- the ‘low battery’ message flashes across your screen. Moments later, your phone dies. You gasp, horror stricken, at what has just happened. You left your charger at home and won’t be there for hours and hours. How will you stay informed? How will you find out if anything is going on? Surely you will miss some big event that everyone is going to be attending. Everyone, that is, but you because now you have no way of knowing about it. You begin to feel lost, completely out of the loop and in some cases even a bit angry.

This universally understood scene illustrates the importance of prayer. Prayer, in a sense, is like our cell phone-- it enables us to speak with the Almighty Creator of the Universe (commonly referred to as God). It is made even more important because it is the only thing that allows us to do this. Yet humans tend to get more in a tizzy over their cell phone dying than we do about not talking to God. We go out of our way to make sure we are never out of contact with the wider world or with our circle of acquaintances (car chargers anyone?), and in some cases, we even have devices that can communicate with people in more than one way (iPhone, anyone? Yeah I wish, too). Many cell phones today allow you to email, text, get on MySpace and Facebook, and oh yeah. . . call people. Ha. Somewhat shamefully, we spend the majority of our time doing this, but how much time and effort do we put into talking to God?

Throughout the Bible, prayer does some pretty awesome things. It gives unfertile families children; it heals the sick; it’s used to give thanks to God; it calms storms, liberates whole nations of people from slavery and sin, and makes great men out of ordinary ones. It stops plagues, ends famines, and most awesomely of all-- it saves our wretched souls from hell. (We could never accept Christ as our Lord and Savior if we couldn’t even talk to Him.) Prayer allows us to speak with God. Such a simple statement, but look at all of the things that this fact enables to happen. So why don’t we spend more time doing it? I have found that the times in my life that are worst (and consequently, the times when I am farthest from God) are also the times when I tend not to pray. At least, I tend not to pray until things get so bad that I realize that I must; for just like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, I realize that life without God truly is meaningless. None of the awesome things that I listed earlier in this paragraph can happen if we don’t communicate with God. It’s like throwing a party, sending out no notice or invitations, and then expecting people to show up. They just won’t.

So I challenge you, reader of this blog (and congratulate you for getting to the end) to pray about Winter Retreat. Pray long and hard about what God is going to do over the course of those few days and all of the days surrounding it. Because if you aren’t in communication with God, you just might miss out on His big event that everyone is going to be attending. And really, who wants to miss that?

Cameron Nations