It may seem like not much is going on. All your effort hidden beneath the dirt. More burying than harvesting. More getting your hands dirty than keeping your life neat and tidy. But deep beneath the soil, out of your sight and out of your control, something is happening.
This is the hidden business of heaven. Tapping into the life that is transferred in darkness. Forming a stability that will support whatever future growth may come. Over time, often when you’re not even paying attention, life begins to sprout.
As Jesus said, this is the way the kingdom of God operates:
“The Kingdom of God is like a farmer who scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, while he’s asleep or awake, the seed sprouts and grows, but he does not understand how it happens. —Mark 4:26-27
Prayer is not about orchestrating outcomes but about nurturing connection. It’s not a transactional relationship with the Divine Vending Machine but loving dependence upon the Creator and Sustainer of all things. Your part is simply to get rooted in the dive soil that will, inevitably and mysteriously, cause all things to become the good that they are designed to become.
Don’t bother trying to understand prayer. Why some requests seem to be responded to instantly and others go perennially unnoticed. Why a certain approach or formula seems to “work” for someone else, but never for you. Why some prayers feel like a deep conversation with an old friend around a campfire and others feel like you’re a weirdo talking to the wall. Who knows, and who cares.
Embracing the mystery of it all is far more enjoyable than trying to do spiritual trigonometry.
Prayer is more like planting a garden than it is fine-tuning a productivity system. If you’re wanting to get things done in outcomes that you can measure and progress you can map out on a Gannt chart, prayer is not the tool of choice. However, if you are willing to allow life to come to you as it will, and for things to grow according to their divine DNA and on the divine time table, then prayer is all the technology you need.
And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. —Colossians 2:6-7
Keep putting down roots. Whenever the inclination strikes you. Respond to that yearning in your gut to push down a little deeper into the divine soil. Pray. Then pray. Then pray again. A steady, constant, daily reaching deeper and wider for the life that sustains all things.
Prayer is more like pressing down into the earth than stretching up into the sky.
Pray with your feet on the ground. Let your roots grow down into Christ. Then you will grow strong enough to stand up straight, to bear fruit, and to endure the winds and pests of life. Then gratitude will burst off of your branches like summer cucumbers after a heavy rain.