Prayer: My Artistic Hotline to Cooperation

OK, it’s confession time…for most of my life I have struggled with prayer. Yep, there it is, I’m a pastor and I struggle with prayer. 

During my Sunday School years, prayer was taught as our way of communicating with God. I had a pastor even bring a red phone into our classroom and tell us 3^rd graders that prayer is like having a “hot line” to God.  At that age, all I could think of was that red Bat-phone with the one big button under the glass cover in Commissioner Gordon’s office on the Batman TV series.  I always wondered if when I prayed a search light beamed into the sky with a God-symbol – maybe a cross or a dove. 
  

Prayer seemed much different from using a phone or having a conversation with someone. Where was the person on the other end?  Who was I talking to? Why didn’t they seem to ever answer?  And when I would ask my pastors, I would get weird responses like: “You don’t need to hear the answer, you just need to know that God hears your prayers” or “God speaks his answers through the Bible.” What the…?

I was a visual learner. I needed something tangible. I wanted someone on the other end of the line not a riddle that needed to be uncovered by plowing through the stories in the bible. Why would a God who wanted to have a personal relationship with me – not want to just come right out and communicate with me?  Was God unable? Was God not willing? Was God simply shy?

My friends all seemed to think God was more like a genie in a bottle. “Ask and your wish will be granted.”  I asked for a lot of things in great anticipation. I was what Sears and Roebuck categorized as a “husky” child.  I am not sure what my pants size had to do with big furry dogs used for dogsled competitions, yet I spent many nights praying in my bed, under my Star Wars sheets, asking God to take away my “huskiness.” The God in the bottle never seemed to answer that one…I still struggle with my weight today.

One thing I have never seemed to struggle with is artistic expression. Whether it is paint on a canvas, words in the form of a poem, or doodling on the edge of my notebook, my artistic desires find a way to simply flow out of me. For several years, as my wife and I were having children and trying to settle down in ministry and life, I let my "artistic side" sit on the bench.  Sure I doodled occasionally, but I let go dormant my expressive side. 

It wasn’t until I traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan to experience Mars Hill Church (at the time Rob Bell was still the lead teaching pastor) that my artistic side began to awake from hibernation. During the Sunday service, two guest speakers were “tag-team” preaching on creativity. They talked a great deal about the introduction to Dorothy Sayers book “The Mind of the Maker” which was written by the great Madeleine L’Engle. In the introduction L’Engle quotes Sayers writing,

“The only way of ‘mastering’ one’s material is to abandon the whole concept of mastery 

and to co-operate with it in love.”

It was in processing this quote that my prayer life began to come back. Prayer wasn’t just about communicating, it was about cooperating with God. I had to abandon the old concepts of prayer and learn a new medium.

I found as I began painting, drawing, or writing, that I was no longer doing it for my own benefit.  I was cooperating, co-creating, with God. The brush strokes, the sketches, the word phrases and word pictures all became ways that God was communicating back to me. As writer and modern artist, Nick Bantock says,

“Art becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your art. Then your art teaches you about life.”

What I have come to realize is that “art” in this quote can be replaced by the word “prayer.” 

“Prayer becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment 

that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your prayer life.   

Then your prayers teach you about life.”

I have realized God does speak to me. He does answer my prayers. He is having a conversation with me.  The greatest thing is he uses methods and mediums that I can understand. As the art flows from me, God turns it into food for my soul.  

One of my prayer journal drawings.

In the past couple of years my prayer life has completely changed.  I have found myself painting prayers unto the Lord, each stroke is a prayer that visually speaks back to me. Each drawn journal entry becomes a window into the prayers of my heart and I am able to see the bigger picture of how God is working among me and through me.  The word pictures that are formed through my poetry or through a blog post become landmarks on my journey to come back to and continue to learn what God has been teaching me. 

What I have realized is that artistic expression is my prayer language and both God and I are collaborating on the final product.  It is beautiful seeing our conversations come into view.   

What does your prayer life look like?