Friday, January 9, 2015
Jeff Lampl
Jeff Lampl
The
excerpt below comes from Tim Keller’s new book titled simply Prayer.
Read it slowly and think it over.
What kinds of thoughts, feeling, emotions, yearnings, etc. does the
following passage from his book elicit in you?
What does it teach you?
Jeff
“In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. I had to.
In
the fall
of 1999,
I taught
a Bible
study course
on the
Psalms.
It became
clear to
me that
I was
barely scratching
the surface
of what
the Bible
commanded and promised
regarding prayer. Then
came the
dark weeks
in New
York
after 9/11
when our
whole city
sank into
a kind of
corporate clinical depression, even as it rallied.
For my family the shadow
was intensified
as my
wife,
Kathy,
struggled with
the effects
of Crohn’s
disease.
Finally,
I was
diagnosed with
thyroid cancer. At one
point during
all this,
my wife
urged
me to
do something with her
we had
never been
able to
muster the
self-discipline
to do
regularly.
She
asked me
to pray
with her
every
night. Every
night.
She
used an
illustration that crystallized
her feelings
very well.
As we
remember it,
she said
something like
this:
Imagine
you were
diagnosed with such
a lethal
condition that
the doctor
told you
that you
would die
within hours
unless you
took a
particular medicine—a
pill every
night before going
to sleep.
Imagine you could never miss
it or
you would
die.
Would
you forget?
Would
you not
get around
to it
some nights?
No—it would be so
crucial that
you wouldn’t
forget,
you would
never miss.
Well,
if we
don’t
pray together
to God,
we’re
not going
to make
it because
of all we are
facing. I’m
certainly not.
We
have
to
pray,
we can’t
let it
just slip
our minds.
Maybe
it was
the power
of the
illustration,
maybe it
was just
the right
moment, maybe
it was
the Spirit
of God.
Or,
most likely
of all,
it was
the Spirit
of God
using the
moment and
the clarity
of the
metaphor.
For both
of us
the penny
dropped,
we realized
the seriousness
of the
issue,
and we
admitted that
anything that
was truly
a nonnegotiable
necessity was something
we could
do. That
was more
than twelve years
ago, and
Kathy and
I can’t
remember missing
a single evening of
praying together,
at least
by phone,
even when
we’ve
been apart
in different
hemispheres.
For
more:
follow on Twitter @jefflampl
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