You may have seen my Facebook post from Speke Resort Hotel, on the shores of Lake Victoria heading towards Entebbe. Not something I’d do very often or for very long but it was very nice, if you missed it, please see below the view from my private balcony:
A bit of time off, combined with the fact that my Kindle isn’t working properly at the moment, means that I took with me a couple of actual books, including the book about prayer in the title. Which I read in its entirety while waiting for a cup of coffee. The book is quite short, and I was reading it quite fast, and the wait for the coffee was pretty long, I have to say, I thoroughly recommend it, it sets out some basic principles really clearly.
Some years ago I was organist at St James’s Church, Muswell Hill, North London. The vicar at the time was Rev Alex Ross, now retired, who was able to encapsulate really important truths in just a few words. I remember a number of things he said, including, “My problem with the Bible is not with the bits I don’t understand. No, my problem with the Bible is with the bits I do understand.”
I feel a bit like with that with prayer, at the same time it’s so simple and so difficult. Hughes’s 15 points include: start with a prayer asking for a help with prayer, find a quiet place, read the Bible alongside. But the one which struck me particularly was: pray with a notebook to hand. In this blog post I wrote about praying with my laptop to hand. For the last few days I’ve been using the back of what I call my ‘day book’ – ie. hard backed exercise book which I use to write down anything which needs to be written down – notes from meetings, shopping lists, things to be done, solutions to A level problems, whatever – to write notes while I’m praying. As a means of helping to keep thoughts from wandering I’m finding it really helpful. And, somehow, the act of handwriting -almost illegibly, of course – itself feels like an act of prayer.
So this morning my reading through the Bible in a year takes me to the beginning of the story of Samson in Judges, to which my scrawled comment is, “Such an idiot! Yet God still worked through him. Hallelujah!” Possibly I’d need to brush up the language if giving a sermon on Samson. Maybe.
Speaking at school chapel under the heading, “Judge not lest you be judged on Thursday, I have a draft ready which I’ll record on my YouTube channel so please do watch out for that. Meanwhile, thank you for reading – and if you have any thoughts on how to make prayer a daily meaningful reality, please do share!
Geoff Tennant's Blog 