20 Items or Less

“You came all the way to Wal-Mart for ONE APPLE!?!”

That was the less-than-friendly greeting I received while waiting to checkout last weekend.  Although I was in the “20 items or less” line, I nervously felt as if I needed to give an excuse for braving Wal-Mart traffic on a Saturday for one Granny Smith apple.  “Well” I began to ramble, “I had to return a couple movies to the Redbox, and I wanted an apple, so I figured while I was here . . .”  The young girl at the register looked at me like I was crazy – going all the way to Wal-Mart to purchase something that would cost less than a dollar.  People don’t do that, I guess.  After all, Wal-Mart is for big shopping trips – not for just eggs and milk and such.

Spurgeon has rightly said that “true prayer is measured by weight, not by length. A single groan before God may have more fullness of prayer in it than a fine oration of great length.”  I have found this to be true – although the lesson took a while to get through my thick head.  Growing up in the church (as a pastor’s kid, nonetheless) brought with it an attitude of pride in my prayer life for such a long time.  I always felt like I had to say the right words, use the correct terms or pray for just the right length of time, because – well, that’s what people expected from Liz Lockwood.  Add to that four and a half years of seminary and I have at times been crippled by my need to sound as spiritual as I possibly could.  I recall so often when I would be asked to pray because “well, you go to seminary . . . so you should pray.”  No pressure, right?!  Taking requests before the Lord would regularly become an exercise in oration more than it would a means of supplication.

Over the past few years, I have grown to love and appreciate the book of Psalms in a way like never before.  The combination of David’s honest supplication before the Lord and clear dependence upon Him has served as a how-to guide in my own prayer life.  The biggest lesson I have learned from the Psalms?  It is alright to be honest with God.  Now, I realize that might sound like something you were taught in a second grade class at Vacation Bible School.  I am sure I was even told this in the second grade.  Nonetheless, this truth didn’t really take deep root in my heart until my late twenties.  It wasn’t until I was brought to points of desperation in my own life that I recognized the need for honesty before the Lord.  For many years, I believed that I needed to approach the Lord with neatly-packaged prayers that sounded really good (after all, God knows that I went seminary, too).  All the while, I was really avoiding the true issues in my heart that needed to be vulnerably taken to the Lord.

We are not supposed to be honest with God in order to inform Him of what’s going on in our lives – He ordains what goes on in our lives.  It is not news to Him.  Rather, we are to be honest with Him about our fears, struggles, failures and joys because that is a means of our dependence upon Him.  When I humbly take my requests to the Lord, it is a recognition of my trust in His providence rather than my own plans.  There are certainly times when it is more difficult to pray and harder to trust in God’s plan.  However, I have found that those seasons of difficulty bring me to a sweet place of honesty before Him in a way that “easy” seasons do not.  Are you finding yourself scared or worried or anxious or alone?  God already knows all these things, and I believe He wants us to know the sweet freedom that comes in being vulnerable with Him.

I believe Isaiah 30:18 to be one of the most affirming verses in all of Scripture when it comes to the issue of prayer:

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.

Re-read that verse . . . “the Lord waits to be gracious to you.”  When you put prayer into its proper perspective as a means of fellowship with the Lord, this passage provides us with a beautiful picture of our Creator God desiring to hear us – desiring to listen to our requests poured out before Him.  The requests we bring to Him today are needs He knew we would have from before the world was made.  With that in mind, let us realize that He has had a solution to our current requests from before the beginning of time as well.  Why pray, then?  Because in so doing, we affirm our trust in Him and His purposes – even if that differs from our current desires.

Contrary to my experience at Wal-Mart, our gracious Father is never going to look at me in frustration if I bring just one thing to Him.  He will not grow weary of listening if I bring a thousand things before Him, and He will not cast me off if I admit my doubts and fears.  So, let’s be honest . . . because God already knows if we’re not.