Attended our sunday school class yesterday. In theory, we are discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “The Cost of Discipleship.” In practice, we are discussing many of the hard questions of faith…often beginning with something provocative that Bonhoeffer said in the book. It has been great fun and I will miss it when we suspend the class for the summer schedule.
Yesterday, we got into an interesting discussion of prayer (among other things.) Today, while digging through my resources in preparation for a presentation I am doing this week, I ran across some quotes on prayer that I had gathered some months ago. I thought this one from Richard J. Foster was especially good:
Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. That puts us in the “on-top” position, where we are competent and in control. But when praying, we come “underneath,” where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent…. The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. This is what grace means, and not only are we saved by it, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.
