I found this devotional most potent this morning and wanted to pass it on to you. Written by Emilie Griffin, it comes from the book entitled Clinging__The Experience of Prayer:
Prayer is, after all, a very dangerous business. For all the benefits it offers of growing closer to God, it carries with it one great element of risk: the possibility of change. In prayer we open ourselves to the chance that God will do something with us that we had not intended. We yield to possibilities of intense perception, of seeing through human masks and the density of "things" to the very center of reality. This possibility excites us, but at the same time there is a fluttering in the stomach that goes with any dangerous adventure. We foresee a confrontation with the unknown, being hurt, being frightened, being chased down.
Don't we know for a fact that people who begin by "just praying"--with no particular aim in mind--wind up trudging off to missionary lands, entering monasteries, taking part in demonstrations, dedicating themselves to the poor and the sick? To avoid this, sometimes we excuse ourselves from prayer by doing good works on a carefully controlled schedule. We volunteer for school committees, to be readers in church or youth counselors, doing good works in hopes that this will distract the Lord from asking us anything more difficult. By doing something specific and limited "for God," something we judge to be enough and more than enough, we skirt the possibility that God--in prayer--may ask us what he wants to ask, may suggest what we should do.
"Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit." Isn't that one of the most disturbing sentences in the Scriptures? We know God asks us hard things. We know he did not spare his own Son. We know Jesus prayed, not now and then, but all the time. Isn't this hat holds us back--the knowledge of God's omnipotence, his unguessability, his power, his right to ask from all of s, a perfect gift of self, a perfect act of full surrender?
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