Prayer & Worship
I have not properly prayed in months and now the guilt about it makes it worse. How do I come back when it feels like I have no right to?
“O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words, and turn to the LORD: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so will we render the calves of our lips.”
Hosea has spent the whole book describing a nation that keeps being unfaithful, and the closing chapter is an invitation home. The instruction is oddly practical: take words with you, and return. He then supplies the words for them. It assumes people who want to come back and do not know what to say, and it removes that obstacle instead of lecturing them about how they got there.
“And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;”
Luke introduces the parable of the persistent widow by saying Jesus told it so that people should always pray and not lose heart. The phrasing implies the opposite is a live risk. Jesus expected discouragement, rather than disbelief, to be the main thing that stops people praying. The story that follows is about a woman with nothing to recommend her but the fact that she kept turning up.
A path forward
Make the first prayer an honest one about the gap itself: I have not talked to you in months and I do not know how to start. That sentence is the return, not the preparation for it.
Set a floor of two minutes a day for the next fortnight and refuse to evaluate how it went. You are rebuilding a habit, not auditing your spiritual life.
Tell a pastor or a friend that you have gone quiet, and ask them to check in on you in three weeks. Long silences very rarely end on their own.
Closing verse
“O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.”
- Psalm 65:2
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