Tell God Your Story

I've had a hard time praying lately. I go through these phases from time to time. For a week or two all I want to do is pour out myself and tell God everything I can, rather than listen to what he has to say. Other times my prayers are very short, because I really just want to get in the word of God and see what He has to say. But lately I just haven't really felt like praying because I get tired of saying the same things over and over again, and a lot of times I get uninterested and pray out of habit or guilt. This makes my prayer time very boring and also very cliche.

I was thinking about this yesterday because I really want to get back to praying a lot, because prayer is so central to what I believe in and it is a big deal. I deal with a lot of frustrations when I pray, as do all Christians, but that's not necessarily what I want to talk about now.

I was listening to this guy (I think his name was Craig) the other day, and he was speaking on sin. He was encouraging people to start dealing with the sins in their lives. Because most all of us get to this point where we accept the sins that we have in our lives and don't deal with them, when really they are destroying us in so many ways and we don't even know it. It was a message I really needed to hear because a lot of my life lately has been characterized by the realization that I'm so filthy with sin. I am so messed up and I know it. It's discouraging because no matter how badly I want to do good, my heart is always drawn to evil and it's so easy to be led astray. It is so much easier to follow my own selfish desires than to act in a way that is counterintuitive to everything I am naturally. It's so hard to care about other people more than I care about myself or, when faced with temptation, to say "No, this is not God's way. I have to turn from this." And when I truly realized that every day I failed to do this, it completely deflated me, it completely discouraged me.

So I was listening to this lecture about sin and I started thinking about the things I have dealt with in my life, and I thought about how my sins just seem to go back for so many years. I've been confessing them to God for years and asking for help, but honestly I got tired of doing this because it seemed like no help came. The truth is, actually, that help was always there but I never truly wanted to begin dealing with sin. I wanted to hold it in my heart and keep it secret by dealing with it on my own. But God has shown me that I have to let it out, that people can't really trust themselves to turn from sin on their own - they have to be held accountable in community.

But what I'm writing about now is not sin, it's prayer. Thinking about the history of my sins brought up a thought that never occurred to me before.

Everyone has a story to tell. And I believe that they would hardly hesitate to tell it if they were really given the chance. One thing that I have been learning this year is that I have so much baggage in my life because of my story. Things have happened in the past, things are happening now, and after all I am a human. I have hopes, dreams, and fears. Sometimes I have a hard time sleeping at night, sometimes I worry, sometimes I laugh and am filled with immense joy, sometimes I wonder and long for something more: I am human. I have so much baggage that needs to be unpacked, so much that needs to be let out. I have a story, and I need to tell it.

Several months ago I got into a conversation with a person I know and he was telling me about his childhood and about how he had acne as a teenager and, because of that, he had really low self-confidence. The conversation we were having had nothing to do with any of that stuff that he mentioned, it was about something else entirely and yet several months later that's the only thing I remember. I was compelled by that because it was a window into his world, his story. Now he is a well-respected man, someone who is extremely confident and nothing resembling a shy, pimple-faced teenager. The conversation made me want to know the rest of his story. In fact, it made me want to know everybody's story. I mean, I would love to sit down with a person and just hear about his or her life - what happened in childhood, what happened as an adult, what are they proud of, ashamed of, etc. What is tragic? What is good? What makes them who they are today?

About a year ago I went white water rafting with some friends. Six of us were in the same boat and, on the way down the river, we had an accident. Our guide was knocked out of the boat while we were surfing a rapid and thus, we were thrown out as well. I was told that our raft flipped end over end and that it resembled the Titanic when it sunk. After we were all thrown out, we all floated in our own different paths down the river. Some of us were thrown through rapids, some of us bounced off of rocks, some went farther down the river than others: we all had a different story. We all survived, and so on the way home we stopped at Cracker Barrel to have a meal, and we spent that whole time with each person telling his or her story. I don't know about the others but I deeply wanted to share what I went through, how I felt, etc. I wanted to tell them EVERYTHING, and so I got out every single detail that I could.

I think that deep down this applies to everybody. No matter what we have done or been through, somehow we want to get it out. We all have things in our lives that we would love to just sit down with someone and share and make them understand how we feel. Not only can we share our stories with other people (which I think is extremely important to do), but we also have a heavenly father that we can go to. I realized yesterday that I'm so tired of telling God the same old shallow prayers and so I'm just going to go back to the beginning. I'm going to dig up all the old stories of all the baggage and situations in my life and just start telling God my story. He already knows it all, and could probably recite it back to me with much more clarity and detail, but that's okay. God wants to hear my story. He wants to hear your story. He is our heavenly father and he wants for us to go to him and let him father us and help us deal with all of the things that have happened in our lives.

Do you have a long drive somewhere tomorrow? Or do you have some extra free time? I encourage you to take it and bring up something that you and God can deal with. Tell God about how sin entangled you so many years ago and you desperately want to be free from it. Tell him about the best day of your life. Tell him about when you first met him. Tell him about your best friends, or your family. Did somebody hurt you in the past? Tell God how you feel, and be completely honest.

After all, when we come to God we enter into a relationship with him. And the best relationships are the ones where you can tell the other person anything, when you have nothing to hide. I think that if people begin giving God their past instead of just trying to forget, then they can start to heal and start to learn. God can teach us so much by just listening to us and speaking into our hearts. I am going to start letting him do that and I would recommend for anyone else to do it too.