Lose Yourself

I had a minor revelation this week. It was great. I realised that I’ve been praying too much.

It dawned on me on Wednesday afternoon – I was sitting on my bamboo mat outside the hut, reading a bit of bible and ‘praying’, and I was wondering why I felt pretty miserable. And then, like an unexpected Amazon parcel, Miriam was delivered. She was with some other little kids and then they just left her in the middle of some grass near her house, and she stood there looking confuzzled. So obviously, I went over, because this looked to me like a time when I could pick her up and she would actually be happy about it! And indeed, I did pick her up, and I took her to her Mama, and then we played for about an hour. We drummed on stools, and practiced jumping (she can’t jump yet without falling over, it’s ridiculously cute) and she experimented with the zip of my jacket, and I brought round a tennis ball and we played with that, and she discovered the joys of holding my hand and trying to pull me into the kitchen hut, and then me winning and pulling her out and swinging her around... etcetera, etcetera, et-beautiful-cetera. And then, for some reason, I went back to my mat, and I sat down, and I realised that I was full of joy. Genuinely brimming with the stuff. And I thought – ‘Hang on a minute, how come praying I’m miserable but with Miriam I’m not?’. And then Brian’s niece Deborah came back from school and started chatting with me, and she ended up telling me the whole plot of Romeo and Juliet (I didn’t tell her I already knew it because I was enjoying her rendition) and then we talked a bit more and she carried on to her house, and I realised that once again, I was happy. At this point, the revelation struck.

C.S. Lewis says that pride is not thinking too much of ourselves, it’s thinking of ourselves too much. He calls it something like an “unsmiling, relentless concentration on the self”. And I must admit pride is the failure that I struggle with the most – maybe by that definition it is for all of us. I am self-obsessed. Once, while I was working in Torquay, me and Rachael had a phone call and at the end she was really upset because we’d just talked about me and I hadn’t asked her anything really at all, and she hadn’t even got to tell me something that was really important.

What God pointed out to me, very gently of course, as he does, was that I had done the same thing again. I used to spend my prayer time concentrated utterly on God. And it was awesome. It was life-giving, it was inspiring, it was joyful, it felt like a gift.  But gradually I had drifted. I had taken the fact that God cared about me and abused it, just like I’d abused Rachael’s interest and love, by spending more and more time just talking to him about me. Just ‘reflecting’ on myself, on how I was feeling, what I was doing, how I was ‘growing’, whatever. And I would read a bit of the bible and see if anything jumped out at me but generally just get excited when it seemed relevant to me. This, I have discovered, is not prayer. I remember hearing Mark Driscoll get really angry about ‘prayer mazes’, where you move through a spiral towards the centre, praying, until you reach the very ‘core of your being’ – I think I laughed at him at the time but I realise now what he was getting at, he said, “Friends, in a prayer-maze, you’re going the wrong way!” Praying is running out to meet God - pouring stuff out to God, thanking God, delighting in God, learning from God... And I was just thinking about me. And thinking about me, it turns out, is both infinitely inferior as a pastime, and thoroughly depressing as a way of life.

The reason I get so much joy out of being with Miriam is that when I’m playing with her I am utterly focussed on her – trying to work out what she wants, what will make her laugh, making sure she doesn’t get hurt. I lose track of myself completely. I used to think the thing that made being with Rachael so good was that I could completely relax and be myself. I was wrong about that. The thing that makes it amazing is that I lose myself in her.

So when I said I’ve been praying too much, that’s not quite true, I’ve just been praying wrong. And in the last couple of days I have consciously stopped trying to impress God, tried to spend more time with people, and stopped just sitting around feeling virtuous because I’m ‘praying’ but actually not praying at all. I spent some time with God this morning, and I properly studied some Bible - actually discovered things about him - and it was interesting and exciting and it drew me away from myself and towards Jesus. And that is pretty much all that I’m aiming for in life. So it turns out once again that I’m a goon and God is good. And Eminem was right all along.