This Isn't How It's Suppose To Be

Prayer, in this sense, is rebelling against the status quo of a world going awry. It is refusing to come to terms with an unjust, dark and evil world, as if it were all we were meant to have, as if there was no one or nothing that could change it; prayer is standing in the light of a God who comes in flesh to say otherwise. But in so doing, prayer remembers not only that the world as we find it can be changed and that it should be changed. The significant piece for the abolitionist to remember is that while I am not going to be the one who brings an end to the world’s suffering, there is indeed one who is. It is at his feet, even in our weariness, where we want to sit.

Jesus instructed his followers to pray, “Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9,10). In prayer we stand in rebellion against a world that is not hallowing the name of God, a world not looking for signs of the kingdom, a world wholly uninterested in doing the will of anyone but self. The nature of prayer as Christ taught us is a persistent posture toward God as sovereign, an undeterred vision of what the kingdom is, can, and ought to be, a vision of what God intended for all of creation.

As the psalmist has prayed:
Hear my voice when I call, O LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.
My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, LORD, I will seek.

The Christian seeks the face of God not to escape reality but to find it, to stand before the sovereign in his kingdom with all that is here and now—with pain and sickness, with goodness and mercy, with all that is unjust and corrupt, and all that is right and beautiful. In prayer, the Christian stands with the one who so loved creation that he joined us within it—in every painful sense of what that would mean for him. The rebellious vision of human flourishing was the very prayer he fought to embody for us—even unto the last rebellion of death itself. Here and now and also coming, on earth as it is in heaven, his is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.