If I’m honest, I sometimes wonder if prayer actually accomplishes anything. After seasons of praying for healing, healing sometimes doesn’t come. Or it does come, and I assume healing would have come regardless of my prayers. Either way, my cynical pessimism seems vindicated and God unconcerned. But that is not the posture Jesus instructs us…
It is often astonishing to me how Jesus instructed his disciples to pray. His instructions seem surprisingly simple, but they are also quite profound. Our constant, and at times thoughtless, recitation of what we call the Lord ’s Prayer—whether in the seemingly sacred spaces of sanctuaries or the periodically profane places of playing fields—has flattened…