Wake-up Call

As I enter this time of prayer, I repeat the words of Psalm 38:9–10, slowly, several times, making them my prayer to God:

‘All my longings lie open before you, Lord:

my sighing is not hidden from you.

My heart pounds, my strength fails me;

even the light has gone from my eyes.’

Pause and repeat

Pause to read the passage Jon. 2:1–2

‘Afflictions quicken us to prayer,’ observed John Newton, the former slave-ship captain best known for writing the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘Experience testifies that a long course of ease and prosperity, without painful changes, has an unhappy tendency to make us cold and formal in our secret worship; but troubles rouse our spirits, and constrain us to call upon the Lord in good earnest, when we feel a need of that help which we only can have from him’*,**

Is it true that ‘troubles rouse our spirits’ and ‘afflictions quicken us to prayer’?

Pause and reflect

Like Jonah crying out to God from the belly of the beast, I rouse myself again today to call out to You, Lord, from the darkness of my impossible predicament.

Pause and pray

As I bring this time with God to a close, I pray a prayer of the eighteenth-century soldier, explorer, and monk Charles de Foucauld:

‘Father, I abandon myself into Your hands; do with me what You will. Whatever You may do, I thank You: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only Your will be done in me, and in all Your creatures—I wish no more than this, O Lord.’

Amen.

*Pete Greig, God on Mute, David C Cook, (Colorado Springs, 2020), p155

** John Newton, Letters of John Newton (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960), n.p.