The Unseen Eyelash

The Unseen Eyelash--February 21, 2017

"...we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God." [Colossians 1:9-10]

It is, as a rule in my experience, a humbling thing to be prayed for.

That is true for a number of reasons.  It is humbling, for starters, because it means letting someone else do something for you... and something that you are quite capable of doing yourself as well.  Letting someone pray for you is rather like letting someone wash your feet in that regard--you could do it yourself, but there is something holy and terrifyingly, beautifully vulnerable about letting someone in so close to your physical space as to wash your feet.  And there is something deeply intimate as well about letting someone in close enough to your soul as to let them pray for your needs.

And since prayer is itself basically asking for help already, then letting someone else pray on your behalf is something like asking someone else to ask for help on your behalf.  It requires the ability to get over yourself and to quit needing to look like a "winner" to let someone else pray for you, at least if you really understand what is happening when someone prays for you.  When someone prays for you, it is less a compliment they are paying you, and more like when someone sees an eyelash on your cheek and offers to get it for you.  It is a sign of love, yes, but also of need you may or may not be able to see yourself.

And that, of course, is the ultimate humbling of prayer.  To let someone else pray for you opens you up to what they see that you need, whether you were aware of it or not.  To let someone else pray for you is not to hand them your personal divine shopping list for them to pick up at the intercession store for you--no, it is a surrender to let them ask for the things they think and sense are most necessary to ask for of the living God... on your behalf.

Think for a moment about how it feels if you, venting about the jerks at your work and the frustrations of messy kids or distant friends, ask someone you trust to pray for you... and in the midst of naming all of those things in their prayer, your trusted prayer partner then asks that God give you patience, too, as well as everything else.  Ooooh... that cuts to the quick, doesn't it? 

Or when you are up for the promotion  at work and you ask for friends and family to pray for you, and one of them shares the words of their prayer, asking that God would give you grace to do whatever God calls you to, and that you would find fulfillment in whatever that is.  "Wait a second!"  you'll want to shout back to your friends and family, "Didn't you get the memo? We are lobbying God for a promotion, not for acceptance!  We are asking for more prestige and money, not fulfillment in what I am already doing!  Get with the official party platform here!"

So often, we are so sure that our own personal wish lists are exactly what we need, and IF we ever dare ask anyone else to pray for us, what we think we are asking for is for someone else to duplicate the list and repeat it back to God.  Apparently, we seem to think that prayer is like lobbying your local member of Congress: it's just about getting bigger numbers of people using the same form-letter message, trying to strong-arm your elected representatives to do what you want.  But that doesn't really happen if we dare to let someone else in close enough to our hearts to allow them to pray for us, does it?  No, other people bring their own perspective, their own vision, their own ability to see the eyelashes we have left on our cheeks, and to gently, lovingly, brush them away.  If I dare to let someone else pray for me, I should be prepared, not simply to get them to rubber stamp my official, authorized list of requests... I should be prepared for them to see needs in me, hurts in me, untapped gifts me, or possibilities for me, that I cannot see from inside myself.

That brings me to these words from what we call the letter to the Colossians.  Here is one of those moments where a wise, caring mentor in the faith like Saint Paul himself offers up his prayer for the people to whom he is writing.  These are clearly people he cares about, people he has spent time with, broken bread with, wept over sorrows with, and celebrated with.  These are people he has struggled with against the bluster of an arrogant empire (you get that sense given the amount of times in Colossians that Christ's great defeat of "the powers and principalities" around them are mentioned).  These are people, in other words, for whom Paul would do anything... and yet, curiously, Paul doesn't bring his apostolic heft to bear in lobbying for the Colossians' personal wish list.  Paul doesn't say, "I've got some pull with the Almighty--here, hand me your demands, and I'll bring them to God for you... and see if I can pull some strings for you."  Instead, Paul says, "I have not stopped asking God to help you see more clearly what God's will for you is."

Wait... what?  Paul noticeably does not say, "You know how you all have been wanting to have a little more money in the bank?  I put a bug in God's ear to ask for that for you."  The apostle does not pray, "Hey, Jesus, my friends in Colossae really don't want to be troubled by having to help out others around them--would you just kind of lay off on letting poor people or hungry people around them?"  Nor does he ask the divine, "Would you please keep my pals in Colossae comfortable and insulated from the troubles of others--that can be such a downer, and they are already really feeling stressed and work... and then they have to deal with picking up the kids' toys... and their cable is kind of on the fritz, too, so could you help do something about that, too?"  In fact, Paul doesn't really give any sense that he has been asking the Colossians what they think they need.  That actually seems to be the point of his prayer in the first place--Paul says he has been asking that God would give the Colossians a clearer picture of what God's will and God's reign are really like!  It's almost like Paul is saying, "God, let's be honest--these folk have no clue what they really need deep down.  But you do--give them what they need, and help them to see what you see about their needs."

Wow--what a humbling place to be: prayed for, and prayed for in particular that God would help you to see more clearly what you really needed all along.  Basically, Paul is praying that the Colossians would "get" what matters to God... which is another way of saying, lovingly of course, that they currently don't "get it."  It's rather like saying, "Jesus, on their own, these guys would be asking for ponies and Barcaloungers, or better parking spaces at the mall and shorter lines at the grocery store.  So would you please help them to see what actually matters... and then give them that?" 

There's this delightful scene in one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy books, where a group of people on prehistoric Earth are trying to invent the wheel--and they are arguing with each other about how they should paint the square object they are working on.  When one of the protagonists of the story laments that they are getting the "wheel" wrong, the crowd shouts back angrily, "Well, if you're so smart, then what color would you make it?" 

The idiocy is laughable when it is in the extreme like that, but if we are honest, so often, that is us, too, in the presence of the living God.  We with our narrow vision think that God's job is to get me a bigger tax refund, keep the boss off my back at work, get my party elected, keep me from having to interact with any unsavory or shady-looking people, or to help my kids' soccer team win the championship... and voices like Paul's say instead, "God, help them to see more and more fully what matters to you."  And if that upsets us, well, maybe we should consider the possibility that we have been fussing over the color of a square wheel.  Maybe we have been focusing on the wrong things.  And maybe what we really and truly need is someone to pray for us in such a way that points us in the right direction, rather than treating our personal wish-lists like a set of ransom demands.

Today, what if we dared to let these words from Colossians become a prayer offered up over us, too? What if you and I dared to have the humility enough to say, "Lord, God, I don't have a very clear picture of what really matters to you--help me to see that more clearly. Help me to want what you want.  Help my heart to ache where yours aches, Jesus.  Help my will become aligned with yours."?  What if we quit treating prayer like a lobbying effort, and instead looked to orient our love with the love of the living God?

Might just make a difference in what matters to you and me today, huh?

Lord Jesus, allow us to be filled with the knowledge of your will, so that we might bear fruit in every good work and lead lives that reflect your merciful embrace of the world.