For many years we had an early morning prayer meeting at the church I pastored in Arlington. A few days a week 2 or 8 of us would gather at 5:30AM for 10 or 30 minutes of corporate prayer. Looking back on it, I’m surprised how many different people participated, and how long the meetings persisted. I often brought one or two of my oldest kids with me, even though they were only 6 or 8 years old. Yes. I dragged small children to 5:30AM prayer meetings. (To be fair to myself: I didn’t mandate it, I asked; and I didn’t actually drag them, I picked them up in a blanket and carried them, or when they were older sometimes we rode our bikes together to the church; and I bothered to take kids with me because I wanted them to share in something special—I thought of it as a worthwhile adventure.) However, when my son was about 8, he decided he should tell his public school teacher about how his dad would wake him up in the middle of the night and make him go to church. You can imagine how that might sound to a John Dewey styled educator. Needless to say, I was summoned to a meeting with the teacher who (now being fair to him) just wanted to make sure my son was okay.
As we walked home together from that meeting, I’m sure my son was simply surprised at the hubbub his words had stirred. But I worried that he had told the story because he felt I had chosen the church over him. That thought crushed me. I knew it should not be that way. So I stopped both of us in our tracks, looked him square in the eye, and told him as clearly as possible, that if I ever had to choose between my work at the church and him, I would choose him every time. The astonishment in his eyes made it clear I had concluded the sentence exactly opposite his expectations; but thankfully also that he believed what I was saying.
Sometimes the weeks we enter promise only the mundane, and our prayers are that God will somehow care enough if not to disrupt at least to notice the works and days of our hands. Other weeks loom menacingly over our timid desire that God would if not intervene on our behalf at least care about our plight. I suspect often that our prayers, and our underlying sentiment, mimic Israel’s. They repeatedly plea for God to wake up, care, notice, hear, and offer some hint of the timeline for His reply. But of course what He told them from the beginning, and constantly, is that when He had everything and everyone from which to choose, He chose them. (Through Moses, “because I loved you”; To Abraham or through Balaam, “blessed are those who bless you, and cursed are those who curse you”; or in Moses’, David’s, Solomon’s, or Zechariah’s metaphor, “the apple of His eye.”)
With exactly that intent, God stops us every morning, looks us in the eye, and tells us as clearly as Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, that we are His treasure, His love, His chosen people. Our prayers don’t attract the attention of an otherwise importantly occupied God. They express our faith in a Father whose attention is as constantly committed to us now as it was when He chose us at the expense of His Son’s freely offered but greatest sacrifice.
May we remember this week that our Father’s faithfulness is easily as great as our every mundane task or otherwise overwhelming challenge; He does, after all, know what we need before we even speak.