Reading again...

I read another chapter in Robert Benson's "Living Prayer" tonight.

This time it was perhaps the most simple and helpful and deeply profound thoughts on intercession that I've ever encountered.

When he talked about it, so many of the things I've experienced this last year made sense.

And I love an author who can write about such a profound topic as intercession without using the word intercession or intercessor every other sentence. I think he maybe only used the word intercession twice in the entire chapter.

Plus, I love an author who admits to stumbling and bumbling his way towards the answers. Most of my favorite authors write like that. I'm not interested in reading the ones who pretend to have it all together. Having it all together seems like such a false way of living.

Anyway, here are a couple of the many favorite quotes I marked in the chapter I read tonight:

If we pray, and if we believe that God listens to our prayer, then to spend that audience on behalf of someone else is an act of selflessness that is larger than it seems. At some level, our prayer - spoken or unspoken, written or read aloud, experienced in silence or lived out in the work of our hands and feet - is all that we have to offer each other. And it can be the best that we ever give each other as well. (pg. 131)

Perhaps God does not need me to pray for myself or for others because He needs help figuring out what to do or needs some degree of persuasion on our part before He is willing to do good for somebody. Perhaps God needs me to pray so that I can be about the business of laying myself and the people and places and things I care about on the altar. It is okay if I do not know what is to happen next. I just need to be laying them out on the rocks - with hope, with faith, with diligence, with attention, with compassion.

Then I need to listen, listen for the prayer of God that is rising in my heart, perhaps for the prayer that I should be praying rather than the one that I am praying. (pg.133-134)