Practicing Until We Need It [excerpt]

© 2009 David Masters, Flickr | CC-BY

When we are little children, we learn to walk long before we understand physics. We speak long before we can spell a word. We sing songs and dance to music long before we can read a note on a page.

Such is faith. We pray, recite, attend worship, and many other things long before we know what they mean. I’ve learned that one of the important parts is that we are practicing for when we need it.

In a recent article, Amy Butler, pastor of The Riverside Church in New York, wrote powerfully about the role of the church today: “We are islands in a world full of increasingly adrift people. We are places of solace and hope, community and hospitality for people who are too smart to believe in God and pretty convinced they don’t need the church — until they do.”

To add to Amy’s words: we all may be children who never grew up, constantly distracted and often guilty of mindless repetition…until the day comes that we need those words and songs that we can say without thinking.

[Read the full article at Practicing Familes]

The Only Thing We Have to Fear... [Excerpt]

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was speaking to a public that had every reason to be afraid. The Great Depression had paralyzed the country, sending once self-sufficient families to the streets with no resources and no hope. But he knew that the country could hold itself in a standstill with its own fear, and that recovery was dependent on courageous action. In that same speech, he urged the American people to recover the “spirit of the pioneer.” “It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure,” he said. In other words, courage was the best way to try to avoid the very things they feared. In their case, the fear was continued joblessness, family hardship, etc.

As a parent who has to watch my children make their own mistakes, it’s not that I don’t have a reason to be afraid. It’s that the way I respond when I’m afraid carries the highest likelihood that what I fear will actually come about.

[Read the full article at Practicing Familes]

A Bedside Confessional [Excerpt]

Richard J. Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline has a chapter on confession. He writes,

Confession is a difficult discipline for us because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin. We cannot bear to reveal our failings and shortcomings to others…Therefore we hide ourselves from one another and live in veiled lies and hypocrisy.

As I thought this, it dawned on me that I’ve almost never practiced confession with the two people in my life for whom it is perhaps the most important: my children.

[Read the full article at Practicing Families]

OK, I'll Pray This Time

The following was written as contribution to the blog project "Practicing Families." If you are a parent, grandparent, etc., please visit and follow the blog and become a part of the conversation.
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I remember well the bedtime prayer I was taught as a child:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Who in the world thought of that second line?? OK, so I didn’t really think anything of it as a child, and I don’t fault my mother for teaching it because she’s not the one who came up with it, but when it came time to teach my own children a bedtime prayer, I skipped the “dying-in-one’s-sleep part” and opted for a second line that was a little less morbid:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Because you gave me all I see, I thank you God for giving me…

…and then my son is supposed to fill in the blank with something he’s thankful for. (I usually do this routine with my 5-year old son, since I’m usually the one to put him to bed). We sing the prayer to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me.” Over time, we’ve added two different endings to the prayer. One models intercessory prayer:

Because you love everyone, tonight I want to pray for…

The other is for confession:

Because you always forgive me, tonight I say I’m sorry…

Why these three types of prayer (gratitude, intercession, and repentance)? The more obvious reason is because such prayers types run deep in the Christian tradition and in scripture. But I also like such prayers because our world is desperately lacking things like gratitude, intercession, and repentance. I live with a sense of worried urgency about instilling such values in my children. In expressing them through prayer, we affirm that we are not of ourselves and that we answer to a higher power and purpose. In the routine I hope to increase the staying power of such values in a culture that has been perilously led astray by the myth that we are self-made, self-sustained, and self-adjudicated. After all, as many theologians have observed, prayer is more for us than God. In Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster writes, “To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us.” Or as Barbara Brown Taylor asks in An Altar in the World, “Isn’t the point of prayers to sharpen my hearing, not God’s?”

Why sing the prayer? We now have research that confirms the staying power of music. It is possibly the most effective tool for enhancing memorization in children. It is a universal cultural phenomenon that is used to excite (as at a concert), motivate (as in aerobics), and even to heal (as in music therapy).

Back to my son. I would love to be able to say that he, being the intelligent child he is, ends the prayer of thanks with sincere and insightful expressions of gratitude. I would be thrilled to report that he ends the prayer of intercession with a perceptive display of empathy for others. I’d love to be able to tell you that he ends the prayer of confession with contrite pleas of forgiveness for being mean to his sister or not listening to his parents.

But alas, I can’t. In fact, I can’t even tell you he likes doing it. He often doesn’t want to pray with me. It is here that my parental concerns of “raising my child right” can get the best of me. My instinctive response is to make him pray…or else. I could, conceivably, use many of the “strings” and potential consequences at my disposal to compel him to participate in praying. In my more thoughtful moments, I realize that such a thing would be unproductive, not only because his compliance would be devoid of the intended purpose, but because I could also instill a long-term aversion to praying. No, this urge to make him do it is nothing more than my own anxieties and insecurities about adequately “training a child in the way he should go.” (Proverbs 22:6)

But that’s where I come in. When he doesn’t want to (most nights), what do I do? I pray.

“I don’t want to, dad,” he will say. “OK son,” I respond, “I’ll pray this time.”

I sing the prayers—and finish them—while he listens. Some parents don’t learn until their child is well past the 18th birthday that they cannot coerce or punish them into being a different person. I might as well learn that lesson now. My children need to hear ME pray. It’s the most frightening thing about parenting: they do as we do, not as we say. So I pray. He listens. Sometimes I get to the end of the gratitude prayer, and he won’t insert his own answers but will ask me, “What are you thankful for, dad?” And while I sing the familiar tune, I offer up my own private hope to God that something is sinking in; that he will grow up to value prayer more than I often have. And it is while I pray next to my son that God shapes and convicts me. ‘I wasn’t very thankful today either, come to think of it. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be the role model of gratitude that my son needs.’

After all, how else will he eventually learn that there’s more to be thankful for than Legos? But that’s down the road. Legos will work for now.