Prayer and Phillip Yancey

I went to hear Phillip Yancey speak on Sunday. Yancey has one of my dream jobs. He picks things he is interested in or struggling with, then takes his handy-dandy journalism skills, and goes out and learns about those things by interviewing people. Then he writes about it. His most recent book is "Prayer: Does It Make a Difference?" (click on the post title for a link to the Amazon description). I don't have it... I'm waiting for the paperback to come out. But he was speaking just up the road and I couldn't resist!

You can make prayer really complicated, Yancey says, but the real keys to prayer are being honest about who you are and aware of who God is.

One thing Yancey did while researching the book was to go to a lot of prayer meetings. People usually pray such nice and polite prayers in those settings. But he went to one where a woman prayed, 'God, I was really furious with you after the rape. And really mad at the people in this church, too... but you were there for me, and some of these people were too, and thank you for that. I know you can bring healing for these terrible scars I have." Now there is a real prayer!

At one point he referred to the tremendous turmoil in Psalm 46:

Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts (46:6)

In the midst of this God says:

"Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." (46:10)

Apparently the word for 'be still' in the Latin version is 'vacate,' from which we get our word 'vacation.' So maybe you could read this to say,

'When everything seems to be falling apart, a huge mess, you can take a vacation. You aren't in charge anyway, and God has got it under control. He will accomplish things way beyond what you are concerned about.'

Sound good?