A, +
A, A, C, Z, E,
J, N, I, S ++
B, A, E,
Dear Children, Godchildren, niblings and kids whom I get to love,
Iain here, assigned and accepting the duty to pray for you, to speak to God for you, with you, and about you, to put in petitions upstairs, to dream on your behalf, to unlock doors in the attic.
Good news, life is wonderful. The sun shines, the rain falls, and the flowers bloom each spring. Every season is an opportunity to bear witness to the sweetness of existence, to the glory of uncut grass, tree roots busting through concrete, overflowing bins, furrowed brows, the rough and the smooth, the brazenly loud and the moments of gentle quiet, when only traffic blares in the distance.
Jesus is His name. Jesus is the beauty itself, the blaring traffic. He is the name on which it all hangs, the person who has gathered goodness into Himself like a harvest of wheat, to be broken as bread for all human history. Jesus is the beauty of life hiding in plain sight. We question whether that really is beauty’s name.
Did Jesus exist? Did he do miracles? Did he rise from the dead? Is He worth following?
The best evidence for all these, and for the ultimate significance of Jesus’ sacrifice, is the self-sacrificial lives of the apostles who witnessed Him, and by extension, the self-sacrificial lives of the millions of Christians through history, and the billions alive today. The best evidence of Christ’s resurrection is the self-sacrificial love your parents give you in His name. If and as you now take up his name and His love, you will experience it more and more richly throughout your life, and end up as the evidence for someone else of the power of indestructible life.
Life hurts. Life is hard for most people most of the time. Some of you have already suffered, suffered immeasurably, because how can suffering be measured? We all came kicking and screaming into this world, holding in our independent bodies from birth a singular trauma, initial separation from Mother. The lives we live we live as an adventure into the unknown, in ever widening circles of independence, circling out into the woods, then back into the home of parental love and care. But the great unknown is also in the parental heart, and in the trauma of initial separation we’re all processing and discovering.
In the dance and play of separation and return, of severance and replacement, of exclusion and embrace, a deep love is stoked like a fire in our hearts. Did you know that all language about hearts “burning” can be very physically experienced? Our hearts hold the pain, they hold the hope, they hold the glory of self-sacrificial love, and burn with the power of glorious life. “Christ in me, the hope of glory”, a glorious hope, truly within you, and all journeys out into the world are also journeys within, deep into your own heart, which is also my heart, also a door to every heart, the very door Jesus knocks on, the great door of existence.
Speak to God in your heart. Tell Them about the joy and pain, the hope and despair. Talk it all through. Meet me there with our words of prayer. A few simple words on prayer: How to pray?
P: Praise
R: Repent
A: Ask
Y: Yield
Praise: We were born to give God glory. We were born glorious, our initial cries already cries of praise to the creator, bringing tears to all eyes. Start in praise. Tell Jesus how good He is. He’ll complement you back, and we’ll enjoy the mutual edification of the kindness of the kingdom of God.
Repent: Acknowledge failings, mistakes, and sins. We often feel inadequate in God’s presence. We are! The standard is perfection, and we all fall short. It’s hard to ignore, so just acknowledge it all word for word, beat for beat, telling Jesus how useless we all are. He hears us out.
Ask: Most of us begin to pray because we want something. Most people turn to God out of desperation. Praise and repentance are better priorities, but cut to the chase and tell Them what you want! Our Father in heaven already knows what we need. Perhaps He just likes us to acknowledge it too, perhaps He likes to invite us into the reflection, wisdom, and ultimately faith that will bring us what we need, help us achieve goals, and bring glory to God on earth.
Yield: All our attentiveness to God will melt into silence, into impotence in the face of omnipotence themselves. What can we do to be holy? What can we do to achieve the things we want? Very little? Nothing at all? Yield to God’s will, feel how Jesus yielded on the cross, join Him there, yielding all our pain to Him, giving it up and surrendering it there at the heart of God’s own surrender, feeling existence as surrender, feeling creation as letting go.
Can I make a request? Can I give you a job? Pray for your siblings. Most of you have them. All other relationships in your growing life will be modeled for you, I suspect, on your relationship with your siblings. For example, Christians get to call all their fellow believers “brother” and “sister”. Extend your natural familial love for your sibling into the supernatural, into the ether, into regular words of loving prayer.
We yield in prayer. Yes, when praying for someone else, as I do for you, I count it better to forget them than to remember. I count it more important to forget them in the face of Christ than to remember them and their place in the world. This forgetting is equally a perception of Christ in their midst. In other words, to pray for you, I perceive Christ in you, I hope for glory in you, I see Jesus hiding in plain sight, yes in you.
With great love,
Iain
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