"Just?"

Please go pray.

Right now.

Seriously. Please take a moment, think about what you need to be lifting up to God, and take some time to go do that. If you don't consider yourself the prayin' type, this is an invitation to give it a shot. I know for a fact God would love to hear from you. If you don't feel comfortable with that, 'tis ok. If you can find someone praying, maybe go listen to them for a bit. It'll be helpful for what we're going to talk about.

I've been thinking a lot about prayer lately. As I've entered into this internship, it's darn near impossible to to not think about prayer, as there is no way I would be able to do this job to the level I would consider faithful on my own strength. As I've been thinking, I've been paying a lot of attention to how I, and other people, pray. Yes, friends, I've been doin' the creep on yo' prayers. Just a bit, though, don't worry about it. One thing stood out to me as I've examined how we pray.

Think back to the time when you were praying. How many times did you say the word "just?" As in "please just do this" or "just move in this way."

Some of you may see where I'm going with this, and think I'm being a bit nit-picky. Stick with me though, I've been praying (conveniently enough) about this for a while, and I think it's important for us to think about.

"Just" was, for a time, the most common word that came out of my mouth when I was praying. This didn't change until a dear brother of mine called me out on my excessive use of this borderline filler word during a prayer time one day. For some of us, that is what "just" is, a simple filler word. So why, then, am I making such a big deal out of it?

I think "just" sets a very dangerous precedent. When I think about that word, I think of statements like "just enough" or "just barely," things which imply some intense limitations. Thinking back on my prayer, this term came out of a personal fear that God wasn't big enough to accomplish all of the things I felt he had given me to pray for. As a result, I was pretty sheepish. When asking for things in prayer, it was less of a "God, I believe you can and want to do this, so please do it," and more of a "God, I don't know what you're really capable of, so please just do this one thing. If you can. That'd be great. Okaythanksbye. Oh yeah, Amen." That sounds like a pretty weak God I was praying to, someone who isn't really worth praying to at all.

Yet scripture shows me a very different image of who God is, and what kind of power He has. Go give Ephesians 3 a read (you're already on the internet, go ahead and typie type it into that search bar up top). Particularly, pay attention to verse twenty. A God "who is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine," now that sounds very different than the God I was praying to.

I consider myself a fairly imaginative person. I think as a people we have the capacity to be extremely creative. We, as a people, are also very good at asking for things. I think if we took even a small amount of time we could, all of us, come up with a huge number of things which we could ask for which would make this world better. I'm putting together everything I can come up with in my imagination, and all of the things which I could ever ask for. What I just read tells me God is bigger than that. I'm going to go ahead and stop and wonder at that for a little while. Give me a minute.

My fear is that we are crippling God by how we pray. The word "just" puts us in such danger to believe that God can only do so much. This means that when the incomprehensibly terrifying things come against us, we're still stuck with a God we don't really believe can handle what we're dealing with. I refuse to believe that.

So here's what I'm thinking. Let's get the word "just" out of our prayer, not to be picky, but to be bold. Let's believe God can do what He says He can do. The next time we pray, and the time after that, and the time after that, let's pray big. Huge. Impossible. Because He can do it.

With His love and grace,

Taylor