Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

A child has been helped and healed. And a man takes off his surgical mask and exhales a prayer of thanks that he could participate in God’s restoration, that his work can be part of God’s own work. My friend works as one who prays, and prays as one who works.

We live in the meantime.

But this kind of humiliation humanizes us. Facing our frailty and limitations teaches us how to be human.

Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because, We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join

what we habitually go to for comfort is eventually what we worship. It becomes our god. But when these other comforts, however good in themselves, become our soul’s refuge, they tend to kill us.

What I most love about this line—“and give your angels charge over those who sleep”—is that it pulls together supernatural cosmic strangeness and the most quotidian of human activities: sleeping.

God’s love is a constant, not night and day, but the speed of light. His love is the center of all things and there is no darkness in it. The love of God—not sickness or weariness or death or suffering or affliction or joy—is the fixed center of our lives and of eternity.

our cultural resistance to any kind of “stripping away of the self” leaves us unprepared for the suffering and trauma that life inevitably deals out to all of us. Even

When I feel sluggish or exhausted or feverish, I snap at my kids, I fall easily into despair, I throw bitter pity parties, I care very little about others. A lot of what appears as kindness or patience or holiness in my life is fueled by good health, energy, and simple pleasures. When these are taken away, it’s clear that I am not that kind or pati

There is no yokeless option. It seems to me the weary should be unyoked altogether, but instead Jesus suggests that all people are under a yoke, that it’s impossible to not be yoked to someone or something.