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

Death reveals the futility of much of what we chase in life.

“absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

Others have heard that God loves us so many times that it’s grown stale. It’s old news. Our grandmother loves us too. It’s nice. But it’s certainly not the orienting fact of our life. It’s not what’s holding us together on our worst day.

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.

If there is no God of love, questions about theodicy evaporate, but so does any redemptive meaning our pain might have, any transcendent story in which we might situate our suffering.

Mysteriously, God does not take away our vulnerability. He enters into it.

To choose joy is to see all existence as a gift, which is why the practice of joy is inseparable from the practice of gratitude. Gratitude gives birth to joy because gratitude teaches us to receive life as a gift in the moment we’re in, regardless of what lies ahead. “It is the truly converted life in which God has become the center of all,”

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

The afflicted unmask the lie that what makes life worth living and God worth knowing are the pleasures I can wrench from my days.