how to pray

Evangelicals Need to Sit in a Room and Say Nothing for a Long Time

Posted on June 7, 2016February 11, 2019 by Ed Cyzewski

chair-prayer

I solve most of the world’s problems right before I go to bed. It’s true. Ask my wife. I have so many amazing ideas, and she gets to hear all of them right before she falls asleep.

I recently solved the central problem with my evangelical tribe.

You know us, we’re the people who claim to have the “good news” and then we basically spend a lot of time worrying about being damned to hell, praying enough, proving ourselves worthy of God, proving we hold “sound” doctrines, defending those sound doctrines from atheists and “liberals,” fearing the fiery destruction of the world, and jumping into the political fray as if the death of America is the same thing as the death of God.

Evangelicals are anxious. We are anxious people who need to sit in a room and say nothing for a long time.

We fill concert venues with blaring worship music and shout, “Come Lord, Come! Come! COME!!!!”

We study, study, study the Bible.

We serve and minister and volunteer.

And then? The crash. So many of us crash and burn with our anxious, hard-working faith. I gave myself to all of this. I’m an evangelical who studied, served, worked, and defended, and all I got was a lousy crisis of faith. Almost every evangelical I know has had a crisis of faith in their 20’s or 30’s. Those who haven’t had a crisis of faith yet are the ones who could really use it the most.

Sure, we trust that Jesus has saved us by faith and grace, not by our own merits. But then we expend SO MUCH energy working and worrying in order to prove that profession is true. We struggle with holy living. We wonder if the defenses for the Bible will be enough to shore up faltering faith. And most importantly, we lose our ever-loving minds because God feels so distant and silent.

So we study harder, we worship with even more passion than the trademarked PASSION events, and we plead and beg with God: “Please show up. Please tell me that you’re real. Please tell me that the years of guilt, shame, repression, and fear were worth something.” Something has to give.

Some snap out of that phase, and realize that the game is over. God isn’t real. How could he be? What God would want people to live with such fear, misery, and uncertainty?

Others harbor those doubts, fears, and illusions, but they stick with the practice of their religion. Jesus matters so much to them. They want the story to be true. They want to believe that God is somehow involved in the world, but they simply can’t figure out how to find that God. They settle for mystery, but end up living without any search for or experience of God.

There’s another option that takes the beliefs and, don’t miss this word, practices of historic Christianity seriously. In fact, the problem that plagues evangelicals today may best be described as a selective amnesia. We have fought tooth and nail to uphold the scriptures and doctrines that the early church passed on to us, but we couldn’t give a flying fig (that’s an evangelical swear word) about the practices of the early church.

There is a stream of Christianity that takes the foundational teachings of our faith seriously—so seriously that they are viewed as givens—without devoting our entire lives to defending them from skeptics. This is the contemplative stream that pre-dates the canon of scripture. This stream has been practiced in quiet and solitude, as well as in cities and small towns. It has driven some to serve actively and it has driven others deeper into the desert. Ironically, those who traveled the furthest into the desert were eagerly sought out by many from the cities. These desert contemplatives exercised tremendous influence and their words remain powerful, relevant, and formative until this day.

The contemplative stream of Christianity tells us to sit in a room by ourselves and to be quiet for a long time. It challenges evangelicals to consider how much we’ve become like the ecstatic prophets of Baal who shout and dance and make a tremendous scene before an unseen god while Elijah watches with quiet confidence.

Evangelicals, we have a lot of good things going for us, but underneath all of our media empires that promise to defend us from the big bad world, our universities that continue edging toward sheltered fundamentalism, our large churches packed with programs and offices (not with prayer chapels), and our deeply flawed hero-worship and business-influenced leadership culture, there is a deep need for the loving search for God. By and large, we are not known as people who love.

I know that “love” is my deepest struggle. How do we generate love for God? How do we love people?

If Jesus’ two most important commands are to love God and to love my neighbors, if Paul said everything he does is “shit” (that’s only a translation of a Greek swear word, so we’re cool) without love, and if the apostle John used love as the only measure that matters, then our disconnect from love has to be addressed.

So far as I can tell, I have found love so difficult because I have been cut off from the source of love. This brings us back to our quiet room where evangelicals need to sit and say nothing for a long time.

The contemplative stream echoes the Psalms that tell us to wait on the Lord, to wait in silence.

For being people who love the Bible, cherish the Bible, defend the Bible, and who attack people who don’t love, cherish, or defend the Bible as much as us, evangelicals do a pretty terrible job of actually believing what the Bible says about God’s love.

I know this first hand because the foundational teachings of contemplative prayer are two things that are both very true in the Bible and very hard for evangelicals to believe:

God is here.
God loves you.

Evangelicals could spend years digging up scripture verses to disprove the very two things that we have longed to know all of our lives. This is why we need to sit in a room all by ourselves and say nothing for a long time.

We need to make a space to become aware of God and of God’s love. This isn’t necessarily a space for epiphanies or visions or amazing spiritual encounters. In fact, the contemplatives warn us that desiring spiritual encounters or amazing visions could become quite dangerous, as they can be self-serving and manipulative toward God. We begin to crave validation and experience over choosing to rest in the truths that God is here and God loves us.

This is a far cry from the anxious, hard-working evangelical subculture. Evangelicals don’t have language for a dark night of the soul. We can only think of ways to shine “light” into a dark night of the soul. When we are given the option of silence before God, we are quick to quote scripture and to begin another freestyle, “Lord we just…” prayer.

We desperately need silence. We need to learn what it means to abide. We need to learn what it feels like to finally be still before God for a long time.

This is the path we walk by faith. This will take all of the faith that we can muster.

I have taken a long, winding path into contemplative practices. They were the only things I could hold onto when my evangelical faith crashed and burned. I spent years worrying that they didn’t work, that God wasn’t real, or that I had somehow alienated myself from God. I freaked out because nothing was happening. I have since learned that this is by and large the point.

People who abide and live by faith don’t need God to constantly poke them in order to prove that he’s real. It took years of learning to search for God before realizing that I’d already been found. I couldn’t make God any more present. I couldn’t plead with God to be with me more than he already is. I couldn’t say anything to make God love me more. I couldn’t add any spiritual practices that would change the way God loves me.

I am loved and you are loved right now. This is the deep, abiding mystery of our faith. This is a truth that can revolutionize our lives.

This love of God is so deep and unfathomably wonderful that the only appropriate response is to sit in a room and say nothing for a long, long time until we accept that God is here and God loves us.

Do You Want to be Made Well? Probably Not

Posted on April 6, 2016January 18, 2019 by Ed Cyzewski

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“Do you want to be made well?”
– John 5:6

That’s the question Jesus asked a blind and paralyzed man. The man was so focused on his own plans and solutions to his hopeless problems that he never even answered Jesus’ question. Perhaps that non-answer was answer enough.

It’s a good thing that Jesus wasn’t picky about his answer. I can relate to this man. Who hasn’t been so fixated on the solutions that work for everyone else? Who hasn’t looked at his own faltering plans and doubled down, trying to make them work?

There’s an even deeper issue at play, at least for me:

Honestly, I don’t want to be made well. Too often I choose to limp along or to stick with my comfortable half measures that make life tolerable. Actually moving into a place where I could thrive and experience renewal takes sacrifices, discipline, and, most importantly, hope.

Do I believe that God can make me well?

Do I believe that God offers something better than what I already have?

Do I believe that reaching out to God will change anything?

Who wants to make time for God if there isn’t a guarantee that prayer will “work” or that God can offer something better than what I already have?

Here is what I’m learning: I settle for far too little, far too quickly, far too often.

The first step you take is often the hardest because you don’t have hope or experience to fall back on. Beginning with prayer is the great unknown. Where is this going? Who knows?

I have learned that Jesus promises “Seek and you shall find,” but he doesn’t offer a lot of details about what exactly we’ll find. We’re seeking the treasure of the Kingdom, but we only have this guarantee: “You’ll know it when you find it.”

Who knows when you’ll find it.

Do you want to be made well?

Yes and no.

I want to be made well, but only if it’s easy and doesn’t cost much. I want to be made well if I can understand and, ideally, control the process. I want to be made well only if I’ve seen the solution work for other people so that I can imitate them.

The hardest thing about spirituality for me, and I suspect many Protestants, is grasping the amount of effort and will power it takes to daily surrender to the love and power of God. The life-change and healing we seek is 100% from God, but it takes everything we’ve got just to surrender and to trust completely. It takes so much effort to bring ourselves to the place where only God can work to heal us.

Healing will never come from our own plans, methods, and “medications.” We can choose to limp along with sleeping pills, wine, recreational drugs, consumerism, or sexual indulgences. We can choose to run from the pain of the past, the anxiety of the present, and the terror of the future. There’s no escape that we can engineer on our own. There’s no way to medicate this pain long enough. There’s no healing that we can engineer on our own that replaces the healing power of God’s loving presence.

As a new struggle, source of pain, or wound emerges in my life, I ask God yet again, “This too, Lord? Must I bring this to you, completely out in the open with a blind faith that you can heal this?”

Surrender is a life-long and daily struggle.

There’s no guarantee about what follows after the surrender, what the healing will be, or how long it will take. There’s no guarantee for anything other than the hope I can gather from past experiences and the experiences of others (including the stories of scripture).

Each time I bring my wounds and limps to the Lord, I find that it’s only through this bracing vulnerability and faith that I can find healing. It’s only through doggedly fighting to make space in my mind and in my day for God that I can expect to be made well.

Do I want to be made well?

Do I want to make time to be made well?

Do I want to make time to hear the voice of God?

Do I want to make space in my life for God’s presence?

Or do I want to keep limping along, hiding my pain and medicating it with the imperfect medications on hand?

You can be made well. I can be made well. I suspect that we can’t even imagine what God has in store for us. That may be the greatest challenge we face when it comes to answering Jesus’ question. Only Jesus himself knows how badly we need to be healed, and that’s why he isn’t picky about how we answer his question.

Whether we struggle with vulnerability or surrender, God’s mercy is more than enough to meet our great needs and weaknesses, even when we can’t manage to say one simple word: “Help.”

I Resisted Winter and Missed the Renewal of Spring

Posted on March 31, 2016March 30, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

The kale we planted in the garden last spring grew into thick stalks all summer and kept our table supplied with greens. By fall the kale stalks were curling and falling all over themselves. Their leaves, which had been full, crisp, and green throughout summer started wilting, turned shades of brown and yellow, and finally succumbed to the constant attacks of tiny pests. By the time the cold winds of November swept the final leaves off the trees, our kale plants were little more than battered stalks with tiny bits of green poking out here and there. Yes, they were just barely alive, but they were far from healthy.

I don’t know why I waited so long to pull out the old kale. Maybe I was hoping that it would survive the winter and sprout new life in the Spring. I left it hanging limp and lifeless all winter. By the time the snow melted, the kale had all but rotted away.

As soon as the weather grew warm, I finally gave in and yanked the old kale stalks out of the garden. I poured new compost into the beds and raked it smooth. A few weeks later I scattered a new crop of kale and lettuce seeds into the orderly garden beds.

The new kale is going to take some time before it’s ready to eat, but I couldn’t hold onto last year’s planting. It had to go in order to make room for what’s next.

How long have I tried clinging to last year’s planting and held up the new things that must take their place?

I have been longing for the new thing, but have continued to cling to what is old.

I have become withered and overgrown, bitter and stagnant, but then I wonder why the new life hasn’t taken root and grown yet.

This week I had a chance to finally pull some old roots up as I make space for a new venture. The “Revert to Author” notice arrived for my first book that I wrote about theology. At the time I was one of many writers trying to sort out Christian theology and whether my faith could survive without the promise of certainty. Some are still wrestling with that question, some have moved on with their faith, and some needed to leave their faith behind. I have moved on with my faith, realizing that I didn’t need an airtight theology in order to have a relationship with a God whose top concern is love.

As I set aside my identity as a writer about theology and culture, I felt both a relief and a fear of what’s next. The fear of “what’s next” is why we often cling to what’s old and dying. We can’t imagine that something better is possible.

I made the mistake of thinking: Better to stick with the broken thing we understand than the new blessing we can’t fathom.

The same day that I signed my agreement to revert the rights of my theology book back to myself, I also continued to work on plans to launch a new website: www.thecontemplativewriter.com. This is a project that has been in the works for a long time, but I just didn’t see how to move forward with it. I kept plodding along with what I knew about theology, uncertain about what would grow if I pulled everything up and started all over.

I finally started planting new things a few years ago when I took a break from blogging about theology and then released Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together. Since then, each step toward prayer and writing, or writing about prayer, has been affirming and life-giving.

It was a long winter, but I now see that I needed the winter. I needed a winter to kill what was no longer productive or life-giving. I needed winter to force me to uproot the past and to make room for what’s next.

Shifting to writing about prayer feels like the beginning of Spring. There is new life to this direction, and I’m finally realizing how I’ve held myself back by failing to uproot what I planted last season.

How many of us go into winter kicking and screaming, lamenting the loss of summer’s warmth and the brilliant colors of the fall because we lack hope for the future?

Perhaps fighting winter is a good sign at times. Perhaps we rightly see the good that we’ve had. I’m grateful for all that I’ve accomplished and learned from that last season. In fact, the things I’m planting today are benefitting from what I planted before.

For this new season, I need to keep writing on this website with longer form posts about prayer, writing, and Christianity, but I’m also making a new space for brief, daily posts about contemplative prayer. The site officially launches April 2^nd and begins with regular daily posts (not Sundays) on Monday, April 4^th.

My new site, The Contemplative Writer, will offer daily posts that provide guidance for daily prayer, Christian spiritual practices, and sources for meditation and contemplation. You can sign up to receive posts via email, the weekly email with highlights and a custom Examen, or follow through the RSS feed. In the coming month I hope to add more spiritual direction topics and a podcast version of the newsletter.

This website is what I’ve needed in my own life. It’s my hope that my own imperfect journey toward prayer and the wisdom of others will prove beneficial for you as well.

Visit The Contemplative Writer today.

Does Christian Spirituality Boil Down to These Two Questions?

Posted on March 22, 2016June 14, 2017 by Ed Cyzewski

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Christian spirituality often boils down to two questions: Do I have time? Will this work?

You could say these are chicken and egg questions. If prayer works, you’ll find the time for it. If you don’t find the time for prayer, it won’t work. If prayer doesn’t seem to work, you won’t find the time for it.

Find the time for prayer, and it will work… eventually.

This is why it has helped to compare the ways that the reflection of prayer resembles the reflection that goes into writing. The two use many of the same practices and mindsets. If I struggle at one, there’s a good chance I’m struggling at the other. My failures and breakthroughs in writing have helped me understand my failures and breakthroughs in prayer.

Writing is a lot like prayer since everyone thinks they can write, just as everyone thinks they should be able to pray. However, both require learning some basic disciplines, mindsets, and practices in order to make them more likely and more fruitful. True, anyone can and should pray. Anyone can and should write. However, just sitting down to write can be extremely frustrating. The same goes for just sitting down to pray.

Disciplines, structure, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us provide a framework that helps us stand. We learn within the security of these structures and disciplines. What we learn from others we imitate clumsily at first. Over time we find our own way forward.

In the case of writing, I’ve faced these questions about whether I have the time and whether writing will “work.” I’ve found that I had to spend years making time for writing, prioritizing it, learning from experts, imitating the masters, and failing a lot. The progress was slow and incremental.

We can find time for just about anything if we make it a priority. I have learned that prioritizing things like prayer, exercise, and writing means I have to really plan ahead during the day for things like:

When will I do the dishes?
When will I fold the laundry and put it away?
When will I sleep and when will I wake up?
How will I keep myself from wasting time on social media?
How will I focus on my work?
Some days go better than others with all of these tasks!

If I want to make the most of my writing time, I need to invest in things like:

Reading constructive books.
Free writing when I have a moment.
Jotting down ideas in a notebook or phone.
Practicing and stretching myself with new projects.

My growth as a writer is a lot like prayer in that I need to learn the disciplines of prayer, learn from people who have greater experience in prayer, and practice using them. Just trying prayer out a few times won’t give you a clear sense of whether it will work. It’s a long term discipline that you develop over time.

Will prayer work? Only if I make the time for it.

Can I find time for prayer? I can, but I’ll be more likely to do so once I see that it works.

If you’re uncertain, discouraged, or leaning heavily toward doubt right now, I trust that prayer is hard to attempt. Where do you begin if prayer has been a source of frustration?

I’ve learned that I need to begin with making time to practice and learning what I can.

We’re left with faith, believing that God is present already and that the greatest barrier in prayer isn’t coming from God’s end of things but rather training ourselves to become aware of God. We can step forward into prayer believing that those who seek will find. Mind you, we don’t know what exactly we’ll find when we seek. We can’t control the timeline of our seeking.

We can only control our schedules and what we believe about God: that God is present, that God is seeking us, and that the simple desire to pray is enough to begin making time for prayer.

Read more about the basics of contemplative prayer and Christian spirituality in my latest book:

Flee, Be Silent, Pray: An Anxious Evangelical Finds Peace with God through Contemplative Prayer

On sale for $2.99

Amazon Kindle | Amazon print | Kobo | B&N

When the Truth Doesn’t Help and God Is Hard to Find

Posted on March 18, 2016February 11, 2019 by Ed Cyzewski

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My pastor once asked during a sermon: “Who would you turn to when your life hits rock bottom, the theological know-it-all or the person who embodies the love and compassion of Jesus?”

Some may say that one need not choose between the two, suggesting that an unrelenting, uncompromising dedication to the truth is the most loving thing you can do. My pastor was aiming at something entirely different.

If you get the truth that Jesus and his contemporaries were communicating, you’ll start to embody his love and compassion. In fact, transformation becomes far more important than indoctrination.

I won’t say I’ve hit rock bottom, but our family is in a challenging, isolating season. It has felt like ALL HANDS ON DECK for months now, and we have no guarantee that it’s going to end soon. In the midst of it, someone said to me, “Remember, we have a great God.”

I’m not sure that “remembering” theological statements in this season has been that helpful. I have been far more in need of God’s presence and empathy rather than intellectual guarantees. It’s a similar principle to the story of Job: when difficulty strikes, theologizing should never come before empathy and presence.

I’m not shutting down the “thinking” part of my faith, tossing out my theology books, or leaving my Bible unread. The big picture of my life doesn’t boil matters down to an either/or proposition between theology and love/empathy. Perhaps I’m reacting against a proposition-based, theologically-driven form of the Christian faith that mightily feared not having an answer for a particular situation.

When life becomes difficult, this fragile form of the faith grasps for answers and throws around truth as if the people in a difficult situation could pose a threat to the stability of Christianity. What if someone’s trouble demands an answer that a proposition-based faith can’t deliver?

More than propositions, Jesus came to give us God’s presence. The assumption is that seeking first his Kingdom and his righteousness will ensure that things work out in the end. If anything, Jesus disrupted the answers of theological systems without necessarily tossing out theology all-together.

Jesus pointed us to the place where we can find God’s presence and experience union with God. I have grown suspicious of anyone who wants to debate that point or inserts caveats.

As life feels uncertain, and challenges pile up, I have longed for God’s presence more than ever. The people I’ve turned to for prayer aren’t the ones with all of the answers. I’m taking my weakness and fear to the people who will pray with compassion and love. These are the people who know the Father’s heart and can intercede on my behalf as fellow beloved children of God. These are the people who happen to have a sound theology, so far as I can tell, but that is only because they have drawn near to the loving presence of God.

Read more about the basics of contemplative prayer and Christian spirituality in my latest book:

Flee, Be Silent, Pray: Ancient Prayers for Anxious Christians

On sale for $8.49 (Kindle)

Amazon | Herald Press | CBD

Jesus Wasn’t a Monk but He Kind of Was

Posted on March 12, 2016January 18, 2019 by Ed Cyzewski

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Allow me to reveal just how Protestant I am. I’ve studied the Gospels closely and intensely for the majority of my life, but I rarely made any connections between Jesus and monks, starting with the fourth century desert fathers, right on through the present day. Jesus was out in the public eye preaching sermons and discipling people, right?

When I became more charismatic, I started tacking on “healing people” to Jesus’ list of activities.

What could Jesus possibly have in common with monks who hid in the desert, took vows of silence, and wove baskets or brewed beer (depending on the century) in their free time?

Sure, Jesus went off to pray in the desert for 40 days…

Sure, Jesus spent entire evenings praying…

Sure, Jesus had a vision of God while praying on a quiet mountain side…

Sure, Jesus got baptized in the wilderness and heard God call him his “beloved son”…

Sure, Jesus prayed fervently and personally with God during his most difficult moments…

Sure, Jesus told his followers to pray in the quiet and privacy of their own rooms…

Wait, that’s starting to sound a bit like a monk.

Mind you, there are all sorts of monks. Some are more chatty, some are more handy, some are more interested in preaching, and some are more interested in preserving the quiet, contemplative prayer practices that have been passed down by the historic church. I can’t imagine any Protestants saying that Jesus was particularly “monastic” in his practices or his ministry. I can, nevertheless, see the common threads between Jesus and the monks. They make a lot more sense when I start looking at the ministry of Jesus.

Jesus was kind of like a monk.

The monks also make a lot more sense when I remember that they were a reform movement in the line of a long history of reform movements that took to the desert and wilderness. When the prophets called Israel back to God, they often hung out in the wilderness. When John the Baptist began preaching about repentance… wilderness. When Paul needed to figure out the Messiah in light of Jesus… wilderness.

As Christianity rose in prominence, the monks recognized that the empire’s power and the influence of the clergy could become extremely toxic. They also fled the pleasures of the city, and even if Protestants would like to critique some of their negative associations with the body (Hello there, early church cultural captivity to Platonic philosophy!), we can sort of get it today. They wanted to remove as many distractions from the pursuit of God, and as Christianity grew in power and influence, they also wanted to avoid the temptations of church-based power.

Jesus didn’t go to the extreme of hanging out in a cave 24/7, but the more we look at the way he rejected the power centers of Judaism and any kind of official position within the religious hierarchy of his day, the more he looks like a monk.

The monks became a kind of expression of the Christian faith in a particular time and place, so the continuity and differences shouldn’t surprise us. Just as Jesus heard the voice of God loud and clear alongside a lonely river or atop a deserted mountain, the monks actively sought to hear the voice of God by pursuing solitude rigorously. Just as Jesus battled Satan during his 40 days in the wilderness, we have many reports of visitors to the cells of monks hearing them arguing with demons.

As a Protestant, I have long considered the monks a different class of Christian. Not necessarily a “higher” class (Hey, I AM Protestant after all), just a different class. They did spiritual stuff and experienced God in ways that I’ll simply never touch, right?

As a follower of Jesus, I continue to face the possibility that he was more like the monks than he resembles a lay person like me. He routinely sought quiet moments alone with God and even made great sacrifices in order to make it happen. Jesus modeled the daily pursuit of God within ministry, and he knew deep down to this core that he was God’s beloved Son, a Son that pleased God the Father.

The monks set off to their cloisters in order to uncover this mystery for themselves. How could the God of the universe love them so deeply and fully? They dropped everything in order to find out. They were so committed to this pursuit of God’s love that they didn’t want to risk confusing the praise of church leaders with the acceptance of God.

I’m still a Protestant, but I’m one of the growing number of Protestants who recognize that the spiritual practices of monks are deep, true, effective, and needed. The monks know a great deal about the presence and absence of God, the intimacy of Christ, and the ways that daily attentiveness to the pursuit of God can reorient our lives in ways that we can hardly touch through hours of diligent Bible study and historical-critical exegesis.

I’m not a monk, but I kind of want to pray like one because the monks were kind of like Jesus.

Confess Your Dreams to Each Other

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

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There’s a Christian tradition of confessing your sins to someone else as a step toward freedom. We may quote James saying, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” James 5:16, NIV.

By keeping our struggles, flaws, and imperfections secret, we leave ourselves vulnerable to their attacks, the shame they generate, and the feeling that we’re inevitable failures in spirituality. I know all of this from repeated experience.

It’s hard to confess to someone else. The times I’ve stepped forward to receive prayer from someone have been agonizing. Perhaps we fear judgment or being exposed as frauds. Perhaps we fear that the prayers of the person we approach won’t help. If there’s a chance that the prayers offered won’t help, then why risk exposing ourselves?

Vulnerability feels like we’re going to trap ourselves, but more often than not, it’s quite liberating. I find that hard to believe most weeks.

I’m a begrudging believer in confessing sins to a trusted friend or mentor, but I also believe in confessing our dreams.

Aside from our flaws, I believe our hopes, callings, and dreams may be the most fragile parts of ourselves. We don’t want to appear foolish, stupid, or ridiculous. We don’t want to set out for a valiant goal only to fall on our faces. Who wants to set out in pursuit of something that carries significant personal meaning and then fail publicly and dramatically?

Mind you, a dream or goal or hope isn’t necessarily virtuous in and of itself. However, before we can even discern this, many of us will suppress these notions before they get out of hand and people find out about them.

I have gone back and forth on this stuff plenty of times. I remember sharing an idea for a book one time in a group of friends and a stone cold silence followed. Someone may have said, “Hmmmm.”

Needless to say, I never touched that idea again.

I’m learning how to manage “confessing” these ideas and dreams and callings a bit. For instance, I’ve learned that the place to start with confessing my dreams is a few trusted people. I’ll tell my wife and then follow up with an email to a few trusted friends and experts to sound things out.

Last year I bought domain name and built an entire website. I felt like I just needed to do it in order to have the experience of building a more static website from the ground up regardless of whether or not I used it. I ran the idea past some trusted people. Many gave it a thumbs up, but a few shared some reservations. Perhaps there were already websites that covered this topic. Perhaps it wouldn’t catch on as I hoped. I asked for prayer. I prayed a lot.

I followed up the feedback and discernment process with some tests on social media. I shared posts and updated related to my new website’s topic.

Silence. Zip. Nada.

I decided to scrap the idea. I’m not sure if it wasn’t my thing to do or if my approach wasn’t the most effective way forward, but I’m pretty sure it was a combination of both.

I’ve been sitting and waiting on what’s next. I wrapped up my book Write without Crushing Your Soul this past fall and have been mentally divided between three book ideas that I can’t quite choose between.

Just as the domain name for last year’s website experiment expired, a new idea popped into my mind. Once again I tested it with my wife and then, before I could talk myself out of it, I zipped off some texts and emails to friends.

I confessed that I needed them to be in the loop right from the start. I told them that I needed them to know about this idea before I bailed. Sure enough, they were encouraging, while I spent the following day picking apart all of the reasons why this website is a terrible idea.

However, once I got over the fear of launching a new website and received some helpful feedback, I started to take tentative steps forward.

This project feels big and intimidating enough that I have to trust in God’s help to make it happen. It’s true to my experiences and, dare I say, “journey” in spirituality. It’s about something that I keep asking God, “Are you sure I should do this?” And I keep getting affirmations in return.

Today I’m plugging along with this new project, and I can’t believe that I ever doubted it or needed to tell someone before I preemptively gave up on it. But the truth is that I needed my friends’ accountability. I needed them to know that at one point in time I had thought this was a good idea, and I needed their honest feedback right then and there before I blew the whole thing up.

Accountability is good for uncovering our faults and struggles, but it’s also good for keeping us pointed to our true north. Accountability helps us put both hands on a crazy idea that just may come from God and to hold onto it through the storms of doubt, exhaustion, and fear.

Confess your hopes and dreams to one another so that you may discern God’s direction. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective

Why We Need the Wilderness

Posted on February 10, 2016April 19, 2022 by Ed Cyzewski

wildnerness-pray

Why did Jesus spend so much time hiding in the wilderness?

That strikes me as a terrible strategy for influencing the largest number of people. He was completely cut off from the existing networks and leaders who could help amplify his message.

His talent pool of potential apostles was also frightfully low in the wilderness backwaters around Galilee. How in the world would he find speakers, managers, and teachers educated and sophisticated enough to carry his message to enough people? Wouldn’t they just wreck what he started?

All of that time in the wilderness also made Jesus really inefficient with his time. He was always withdrawing to pray for long stretches of time. Didn’t his life feel a bit out of balance, always praying alone or teaching a few disciples instead of communicating to larger crowds on a regular basis?

Every time Jesus returned to the centers of power and influence, the religious leaders met him with strong opposition and applied one test after another to determine whether he was an insider or an outsider. If he refused to play their games, he most assuredly had to be an outsider.

Why did Jesus choose the wilderness?

He prioritized prayer.

He preemptively identified himself as an outsider so that his message did not depend on the religious establishment to prop up his ministry. He let the message grow on its own.

Notice that Paul did something very similar. He withdrew to the wilderness for a period of time and then let his message rise and fall more on its own merit and inspiration from God rather than depending on the leaders of the early church.

The wilderness is where we begin and build the right kind of foundation so that we actually have something worthwhile to say.

I confess that I didn’t start out loving the wilderness. I still have my gripes about it today.

I’m finally appreciating the value of moving forward at my own pace (God’s pace?) as the Spirit leads. I don’t kick and scream quite as loudly when I need to go into the wilderness. I can see how a seeming step backwards into the wilderness is the only way I can move forward.

Most of us don’t need one more thing to do. We need more wilderness, more space, and more withdrawal.

I remember reading piles of Christian books throughout college and seminary, and I started to hate a particular phrase: “We must…”

We must engage this, we must consider another concept, we must remember, we must do another thing, and we must keep adding one… more… thing… to do. The more a book said “We must,” the more I resisted the impracticality of its message. It seemed like every Christian book I read was an unintentional recipe for spiritual burn out.

Americans are a people deeply invested in doing. We’re optimistic work-a-holics who have a reputation for taking a fraction of the vacation time that the rest of the world deems essential. As a culture, Americans aren’t very good at withdrawing from much of anything. When we burn out, we immediately blame ourselves for not being strong enough, not being resilient, not being organized, or not hiring someone to help us do more.

If we try to fix a problem, we tend to fix it by adding “something” else to the mix rather than subtracting. If you want to fix your diet, you focus on eating MORE of something else, such as meat (hello, Dr. Atkins). If you want to fix your crowded schedule, you get a cool new app or five cool new apps that all sync together. If you want to fix clutter, you buy better storage containers.

As a culture, we don’t have much of a grid for disconnecting. We don’t naturally value the wisdom of those who speak from a place of simplicity and less unless that simplicity comes with a product attached to it.

Venturing into the wilderness doesn’t look like STRONG LEADERSHIP^(TM). We fear that the vision, strategy, and key results are all going right down the toilet when we step away. Perhaps they will. Then again, if we keep pushing, keep adding, keep trying to bear it all, we will break down, wear out, and burn out. We need the strength to admit our weakness.

It’s an act of faith to withdraw. I’m trusting God to provide for us and to guide us when I step back and make the nearly impossible admission that I can’t do it all, that I don’t know where all of this heading, and perhaps exerting more control is the worst thing for me.

Most importantly, when I look around and wish I had more influence or could expand my work to new, greater heights, that’s most likely the exact moment I need the wilderness. Growth that’s lasting and meaningful comes from the wilderness.

The lure of “I want it now!” success doesn’t mix well with the wilderness.

The wilderness will kill our drive for quick success. That’s why we need the wilderness.

Why Jesus Needed to Pray

Posted on January 25, 2016April 19, 2022 by Ed Cyzewski

wilderness-prayer

I’m not 100% certain about all of the reasons why Jesus needed to pray. The thing is, once I start asking why a member of the Trinity would find it necessary to pray for long stretches of time, it makes me wonder if I’m still missing something about prayer.

Why do I pray?

I pray out of fear or a sense of need.

I pray because I feel distant from God.

I pray because I hope to intercede on someone else’s behalf.

I pray to let go of circumstances.

I pray to say thank you—that is, if I’ve managed to loosen my grip on a situation long enough to wait on God.

You could say that my prayer life is very result-focused. I have an outcome or goal in mind. Even my moments of quiet prayer have a goal of sorts in mind. That’s not necessarily wrong. We are told to make our requests known to God and to even be as persistent as a woman who wakes up an unjust judge in the middle of the night in order to plead her case.

There’s an untiring tenacity that the writers of the Bible use to describe prayer over and over again. It’s not wrong to say that prayer can be result-focused. The difference is this: I wonder if sometimes I’ve made the mistake of ONLY being result-focused with prayer.

From the 40 days in the wilderness to the all-night prayer-a-thons that pop up throughout Jesus’ ministry, we can’t possibly think he spent the entire night making requests or saying thank you for things. There’s every reason to believe that he spent significant amounts of time before God in silence, especially since the Psalms, which many Jews had memorized, instructed him to do just that when praying.

I recognize that we’re well into the territory of speculation, but it’s reasonable speculation with a Biblical precedent. It’s not outlandish to presume that Jesus spent long stretches of time simply sitting, kneeling, or standing in stillness before God.

Such prayer leaves the agenda up to God, and nothing at all may happen. Then again, everything could happen. It’s not about what we say, think, or do. There’s no special incantation or procedure that you have to get “just right.” There’s just you and God and a quiet stretch of time that is open to the Spirit.

I suspect that Jesus craved this time with God the Father so much that he was willing to lose an entire night of sleep in order to make it happen. That strikes me on one level as a mind-blowing level of commitment since I’m a sleep deprived parent of young kids. And yet, many people who work out or pursue a serious hobby often sacrifice sleep in order to make it happen in the early or late hours of the day.

The same benefit of writing or running in the still, silence of the morning can be found in a late night prayer time that commits to both speak and listen to God the Father. I suspect that Jesus craved the simple, singular focus of his attention to God the Father. He knew that his days were filled with people making requests, asking hard questions, and traveling throughout territories that were sometimes hostile. Each day presented new challenges and conversations that were no doubt exhausting physically and could leave little time to focus solely on the Father.

There was nothing in the middle of the night that could pull his attention away from the Father. While I don’t know exactly how the Trinity works or how things lined up while Jesus was incarnated on earth, the simple answer is that Jesus craved uninterrupted attentiveness to the Father.

While surrounded with so many people who either misunderstood him and his mission or outright opposed him and even plotted his death, Jesus found his rest in solitude with the Father.

As an American, I’m obsessed with growth, progress, and results. I want things I can measure. I want to work on stuff and excel.

I desperately need to imagine Jesus venturing away from the city in order to find the quiet he needed in order to meet with the Father. I need to imagine him sitting down and letting go of the questions, controversies, and needs that surrounded him nearly every waking minute. In that solitude he is attentive to the Father without distraction, and like a warm breeze drifting from the nearby sea, his Father’s love settles over him.

Can Parents Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry from Their Lives?

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Ed Cyzewski

I read once that in the early days of his ministry at Willow Creek Community Church, pastor John Ortberg contacted a spiritual leader for advice (I think it was Dallas Willard).

“What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” Ortberg asked.

Long pause.

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life,” he said at last.

That’s it. Willard refused to add anything else to his advice—not even a footnote.

That concept sounded challenging when I only had to manage myself and my anxiety-ridden mind. Now we have kids, and hurry just feels like the baseline for every day.

Before the birth of our first son, I asked a mother of three (now four) about the ways that having a kid changes your day-to-day life.

Her eyes grew big. “The nap,” she said. “Everything revolves around the nap.”

I only have two kids, but her advice has proven true thus far. Most days I can only make the nap happen if I hurry.

If you’ve ever seen a young kid completely losing it in a store, red-faced bawling and throwing everything while shrieking, “NOOOOO!!!!”, you have most likely seen evidence of either a late nap or no nap. Not every time, mind you, but this is a typical outcome for nap-less child.

I consider myself a spiritual or contemplative writer. I also spend about half of each day with our kids. Hurry feels essential to the latter even if it’s toxic for the former.

Most days it’s on me to get the kids home in time for their naps, preparing lunch, finding what they need for nap time, and setting things up for a smooth transition for when my wife comes home to put the oldest down for a nap.

If I’m late, there’s no wiggle room. Lunch is a long, slow, messy disaster where the older child spills milk frequently, food is chewed up and then thrown by the younger child, and both require constant prodding to take the next bite.

You could say that each day is like a stack of dominos where falling off course at an early point in the day makes it that much harder to knock out the next thing.

If the kids are late for lunch, then I can expect that they’re late for their naps, I’m late to my work, the chance of at least one kid having a melt down increases, the chance of short or skipped naps increases, and then an afternoon of over-tired and cranky kids increases.

There’s no single moment that is a make or break scene. A late nap isn’t a guarantee that the wheels will fall off. It’s more like you’ve loosened up the lug nuts on the wheels and taken a high-speed drive on a bumpy road.

In order to make the nap happen I have to manage the prodding of my children throughout the morning. If we’re going to the children’s science museum and still have time for lunch, the ideal is to leave the house by 9:30 am, and the prodding always includes negotiating, cleaning up spills, and multiple threats. The journey from the parking lot to the ticket desk to the play area requires SIGNIFICANT prodding to stay on track. Then the play time is followed by more prodding to get a snack and more prodding to get all the way back to the car and then, hopefully, a little prodding to get into the house.

I know that my tendency is to be a hurried, up-tight, no-nonsense parent. While we can’t stop and look at every single display in the science museum hallway, I began to wonder this fall if I needed to work on cutting back on the hurry in my life. I started to notice that plenty of parents bring their kids 5-10 minutes late for pre-school. Yes, our son prefers to be there early, but that has yet to translate into cooperation when leaving the house without a long list of conditions and needs.

There are times when we genuinely need to move faster in order to get the kids home in time to eat and then sleep. However, hurry has also become a default setting of sorts for myself.

Hurry becomes a lifestyle rather than an occasional tactic for moving kids in the right direction when time is of the essence.

I’m working on my awareness of hurry through my daily Examen practice. I want to know when I’m making too much of a small thing. I also want to extend grace to myself when I’m doing my best to handle a difficult situation.

I can feel the pull of hurry when I’m praying, meditating on scripture, reflecting on my day, or reading at the end of the day. There’s a pull to get this done and move on to the next thing.

With hurry, life becomes a production line where tasks need to be completed efficiently and production capacity is the only goal.

Hurry hates stillness and quiet.

Hurry hates “being” because it’s all about doing. Spirituality needs being in order to translate into doing.

Parents who want to cultivate a healthy spiritual life regularly face this gap between what spiritual leaders tell us we need and the meager scraps left in our days. This spiritual struggle while parenting small children is well documented in Micha Boyett’s book Found.

Must parents watch their spirituality whither away under the burden of hurry?

I’m very much in process here. I don’t have the answers. I do have an observation:

The spirit or mindset of hurry strikes me as a far greater threat rather than beating myself up over each time I have to hurry in order to keep our kids happy and sane.

I don’t want to let hurry become my default. I don’t want hurry to be a part of nearly every interaction with my kids.

And here’s the real kicker and perhaps the greatest trap of all: We can be in a hurry to get rid of… hurry.

I’ve been moving into a season of awareness and discernment about hurry. I don’t want to rush this. After all, I most likely became a hurried, worried parent gradually. What makes me think the solution will happen overnight?

I’m not in a hurry to address my struggles with hurry, and that feels like enough for today.