Incoherent Prayer

Life. How can something be so painful, and yet so healing? So complex and yet so simple. So beautiful, and yet so devastatingly disgusting? “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (I Thessalonians 5:16-18) In all things we give thanks. All things. Thank God for the smell of the freshly fallen autumn leaves, and the feeling of cool rain on your skin. At the same time, praise Him for the knees you scraped while climbing the trees, and the flood that came with the rain. Is that it? Or is it that we praise Him for what we gained from scraping our knees and drowning in the water? And how can one pray without ceasing? My life has been less than a prayer to God. Maybe a plea of a whining child, but not a praise. Not a prayer.

So many times I feel myself at a loss for words. I find myself distracted, or unable to express coherent thought. And the only way I can say what I want to is through writing. Can I write prayer to God? If I do, it will probably end up like this; an endless thought, that runs together, again incoherently. Writing has been my form of expression for so long. I can say how I feel, and then if I can’t say it in writing, I can find music that says it. Maybe not in the words, but somehow the melody, sometimes, takes me and rolls my heart out like a map.

How does one actually tell people how they feel? And yet, we are required to. If we never told anyone how we felt, nothing would ever get done. I heard someone say that emotion was overrated, and, at the moment, I am almost inclined to believe him. But then, emotion makes up so much of our lives, and if it weren’t a part of human existence, we would just be robots without a purpose. God gave us emotion for a reason, right? What makes music so wonderful? The emotion in it. From punk rock or classical, the reason we enjoy music is because of what it makes us feel, and the emotion that the artist has invested in it. Had we no emotion, music would be a string of noises with no purpose and no meaning. And why do we react to things that people write? We react positively or negatively because of the emotion it makes us feel, or the emotion (or lack there of) in their writing.

So this is how I convey how I feel: my words. Rarely will I tell you how I feel to your face. I’m not quite sure why it is. For some reason, I am more comfortable pouring myself out in writing. If you read how I feel, for some reason, it isn’t as hard. Maybe I’m hiding behind the letters, stuck in the crook of the “s” like a little kid hiding behind her mommy on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing, and when I’m writing it, I can revise as many times as I want to before it is read, so I don’t say the wrong things.

Life. God put me here for a reason, right? I’m not just here to be used and thrown away, right? I will learn. I will learn to wait. I will learn to pray, and to make my life a prayer. I praise God for this confusion. God, I don’t know what you are doing with my life right now, but I pray that you will teach me to wait and see. I thank you for whatever it is, and I pray that you will give me the strength to praise you through the scraped knees and floods of this life.