In 1997, I was asked to lead a team of youth workers on a trip to India to train leaders in the Missionary Church of India. We visited Calcutta, New Delhi, and held our training in the village of Raghunathpur. One of the aspects of the trip I was most looking forward to, was an audience with Mother Teresa. She was a friend of our host, Pronoy Sarkar. Unfortunately, Mother Teresa passed away less than two months before our arrival.
I would have loved to ask her about her work among the lepers of Calcutta and the dangers it involved. There was so much I could have learned concerning her motivation for the commitment to her work and the many lives that were touched by her care. She could have shared her observations of having won the Nobel Peace Prize. But it never happened.
Who would you most like to meet? If you were granted an hour to sit and talk with anyone, past or present, who would it be? It might be one of our founding fathers or a person from ancient history. You could choose someone from the current events who interests you.
Many of us will never have that dream encounter; that conversation with a famous person. What if I told you this doesn’t have to be true? What if I told you that you could have a conversation with not just any famous person, but the most important, most powerful being in all the universe. In fact, he is waiting every moment of every day hoping to hear your call to him. Jeremiah 29:12, “Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” Psalm 17:6, “I call on you, my God, for you will answer me; turn your ear to me and hear my prayer.” James 5:13, “Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.”
Some may avoid spending time in conversation with God because you don’t feel you know how to pray. We have this encouragement in Romans 8:26, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”
If God is the all-powerful, all knowing, everywhere present, all loving being we say we believe that he is, how could we not want to spend time talking with him? We don’t have to fear him if we come in humility. In fact, he invites us to enter conversation with him with boldness. Hebrews 4:16, “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
It all comes back to the question we’ve been asking over these past few weeks. “Is having a conversation with God on a regular basis something that I hold to be sacred? Is it a non-negotiable priority of every day? This can only be measured by our action. We don’t converse with God because we must. We converse with God because he is worthy of our attention and he desires to have our interaction. We can learn a lot about God as we pray if we take time. Time to express our adoration and praise for who he is. Time to offer our submission to his plans and purposes, time to ask for those things we need from him, and time to listen to see if there is something he wants to say.