“Is it Ok for us to bring trivial prayers, or even selfish prayers, to God?” asked a dear friend, recently. Yes, I answered! How so?
God gives us models to help us understand Him. One such model is parenthood. God invites us to call Him by many names, including Lord, Almighty and Everlasting. Yet, He also refers to Himself as our ‘father’. Jesus, who is God, taught us to pray to God saying ‘Our Father’. Jesus prayed aloud so that we could learn from him how to pray. He called God ‘Abba’, which is a Jewish word that simply means ‘father’, but it’s a familiar, almost childlike way of saying father. It’s not quite ‘Daddy’. It is closer to ‘Papa’. Jesus suggests that we too can pray to God as Abba Father, or in the language of our day might say ‘Papa’. (Now of course we understand that the culture of Jesus’ time was one in which leaders were usually male. So the male word ‘father’ was a culturally natural way to speak respectfully of a parental leader. We also know that God contains all gender identities in ‘Him’self to that all aspects of femininity and womanhood are found in Him. So please hear my use of Papa, and Father not as gender exclusive. Perhaps Abba is more helpful for us in this respect, as a word from a foreign language may not land in our ear with gender-exclusiveness.)
Papa/Abba God wants to relate to us just as a parent would relate to his child. If you have been a parent, then perhaps you can remember when your child/childre were toddlers, and at the end of the day, they wanted to climb up into your lap, snuggle up, and tell you all about their day. It didn’t matter how trivial their news, or how self-centered their concerns, it delighted your mother’s heart, your father’s heart, just to hear their voice, and to listen to the concerns of their heart. You smiled, and your heart was warmed and filled with love for your child. This is how God listens to our prayers. He delights in us, smiles over us, and no matter if we are praying about war, famine and global disasters, or praying to him about the squeaky brakes on our car, or worried about some tiny concern, Abba/Papa wants to hear from us, and delights in us.
If we find that our prayers are always about us, then the Holy Spirit can work with us to shift our focus so that God is at the center of our souls and then we will begin to once again pray about others as well as ourselves. Yet we need not be bound up in shame, or guilt, or worry so that our prayer life is inhibited.
This week, try to start your prayers with a name for God that reflects the trust and intimacy that you have, or that you wish to have, with Him. Papa, or Abba may be good choices. Then tell God about everything on your heart, and trust that you have been deeply heard, and truly loved and fully known. May it be so, Amen,