At Home in Prayer

Picture yourself at home. How do you feel? What do you see? Where are you?

The answers to these questions are remarkably different for everyone. I met with a small group this morning and we talked about this very same question.

For me I was in the country, just me and my family. I saw the house that I've lived in my entire life that looked over fields and timber.

For someone else it was his dog and his pool where he felt at home. One girl felt at home in a canyon in California. Another girl saw her father and cousin who had recenly passed away.

You know that feeling you get when you're in you're own home? You're comfortable and cozy, you feel protected and loved. You have everything you need around you and everyone you love close by.

It's not quite the same feeling when you visit someone else's house. When you go to visit their house it may be bigger, fancier, cleaner, more organized, have a wonderful aroma and be the house of your dreams, but it's just not HOME. It's a beautiful house and makes a great home for whoever lives there, but it's not YOURS.

There are things in that house that just don't fit your life style. That house is tailored for the people that live there. We all have different visions of what home is, I don't think I'd be at home in a canyon in California or with that guys' dog.

That's kind of how I see my prayer life.

When I came to college and to St.Lawrence I was being introduced to college students with prayer lives that knocked my socks off. I wanted their prayer life, maybe I even envied it! Sometimes I would see what they were doing and think 'I can do that too!' but it just wasn't the same.

God has made each relationship with us as individual as the homes we live in. To me those students I saw with the amazing prayer lives were the people with the big beautiful houses. It was nice to get ideas from them but I could never be at home there.

You see I can't find myself at home in someone else's prayer life. I have to build my own. Every house starts with the same foundation, a foundation on rock. 

A shack and a mansion are both started with a single 2x4 piece of wood. Now maybe I'm not living in a mansion in my prayer life currently, but God supplies me with everything I need in order to have the home in prayer that He desires for me.

Even in the middle of the country smack dab in the middle of a wheat field!