If a son asks his father for a scorpion, does his father give it to him? How about if he asks for ice cream? What if he asks for ice cream… and then again… and again… and again? There’s a time for ice cream, but there’s also a time for going to bed, no?

There are some things that even repeated asking will not produce, no matter how resolute or plaintive such asking may be. I wish I was so savvy as to apply this logic in my own prayer life.

I am convinced that for each of us, God has a massive long list of things which he is simply longing for us to ask him for. Seriously, I imagine him shaking his head, “Why don’t you ask for this, because this I can actually give you!” I picture his pained expression as I determinedly plow through my laundry list of wants, none of which are even close. I suspect that a great many of the things I spend my prayer time asking for are things of the wrong sort – things that I happen to want but which are, in reality, closer to Ice Cream Before Bed (or even scorpions!) than to the necessities I believe them to be.

Every once in a while, I get brave enough to ask the question – “What if I stopped asking for the things I wanted and decided to seriously discover and pray for the things that God would like me to ask for?”

I have a sneaking suspicion that God answers in power when I pray, but that his exercise of power remains curiously stunted so long as I am committed to praying for things that just ain’t. gonna. happen. Odd, isn’t it? I can pray a very long time for God to change every circumstance and person around me. I’m well practiced at praying from a perspective where I am the center of all things. (“Dear God: Please restructure everything. Scott.”)

Of course, I’m also well practiced at sitting around and wondering where the power in my life is, asking why I am constantly falling short of the Victorious Christian Life (TM).

The answer, of course, is ridiculously simple. What I ought to be doing is finding out the sorts of things that God wants me to pray for, and start praying for those. Bring down the POWER!!! There’s only one wrinkle. I don’t want to pray for those kinds of things. I mean, seriously… I don’t want to. These are the things which are right at the heart of God but which are really really far away from the things that shiny and are distracting me right now.

These kinds of prayer items have a nasty tendency to stray into some pretty touchy areas, like the ugliness of my own sin or the pain of my own hurts. Worse still, into the ugliness of other people’s sins, whom I need to forgive – or the pain of their hurts, for which I need to ask forgiveness. The Holy Spirit came to lead us into all truth – but if the truth is that I need to change, do I really want to hear it?

Let me tell you – I get to thinking about a list of things I could be praying for, and I get rebellious and fearful. It’s a completely different reaction than my reaction to ordinary prayer – of wistfulness, regret, and pettiness. It’s a short trip for me, from “Lord, why are you not bringing The Power?” to “Lord, please not that power!” I’m not afraid of these things because I think they’re bad, I’m afraid of them because of those parts of me that are bad don’t like them. It’s like John says: my darkness doesn’t want to come to the light because the light will reveal it. It’s a scary thought: maybe I ought to be praying for things which I don’t want.

So here’s a list of things that I don’t pray for. I believe that if I ever did start praying for these things, my life would shift – I would start stumbling over opportunities to follow God in testing, challenging ways that would reveal God’s goodness, power, and action in this world. This list will be skewed, because my understanding of God’s heart is skewed, but it is a starting point.

• Show me someone whom you love but whom I am ignoring.
• Is there someone really unappealing whom it would delight you for me to serve?
  • God seems to really care about people who I loathe. The awkward and the socially incompatible and the immigrants and the distant rich. I get scared thinking about how much he loves them and how little I do.
  • Can you imagine how much joy God would feel if I finally started asking him to empower me to help those who he dearly loves and is longing for me to help? You’ve got to believe that if I started praying for this that the Holy Spirit would start stirring in tangible ways.
  • The inescapable irony is that if I ask God for a name of someone I don’t want to help, and he actually gives me a name… I won’t want to help them!
• Who would you like me to confess my unconfessed sin to?
  • A real person? It’s not fair to demand that of me! I mean, that’s in direct conflict with my people-pleasing and my fears of rejection!
• Which of my hopes and dreams do I need to let go? Will you show me which idols I am clinging to, even if they are near and dear to me?
• Please give me an opportunity to witness to ____
• Is there a free-will offering that I can offer which will really delight you?
• Is there a habit that you want me to be free from?

Like I said, I don’t pray for these things. This bothers me. I suspect that this is closely tied to a lack of fear of the LORD – an unwillingness to give him due and proper consideration in prayer, which you gotta figure is pretty near all consideration.

The above list is a negative list, but probably just because I’m a problem oriented thinker and I react instinctively to things that are Wrong and Must Be Fixed. There are positive things that God wants, which I don’t pray for either, for a variety of reasons. Maybe I’m being deceived into an unhealthy focus on the negative list. Here are some more things that I never pray for:

• Is there a way that I’m not being fed but in which you are willing and waiting to feed me?
• Is there a gift or a blessing that I should be seeking after?
• What fruit do you love to see the most when you look at my life?
• Which of my friends has done something special for me that you want me to offer thanksgiving for?
• Will you show me a way that I can strengthen the church this week?
• What relationship would you like to build and strengthen? How can I pray for your consecration and blessing of it? Will you give us a special care and compassion for one another?
• Is there a psalm I can pray (or sing) that will be especially pleasing to you?
• What act of worship will you really delight in right now?

I suspect that, having listed these, I will now have to Man Up, be obedient, and actually pray some of these. After all, doing things I don’t want to is a necessary part of growing up (which I was never particularly good at, but which I’ve always suspected I ought to do). In the meantime…

What don’t you pray for?

A leaky roof is always leaky; its real state (the truth of it) never changes. But the experience changes on a daily basis and is entirely dependent on the weather.

God’s purpose for us is that we be made whole. Unfortunately I often have that leaky roof relationship with God – when I feel fine I don’t have a problem, do I? The difficulty with running on feeling is that it flops up and down. It suffers delays; often it takes a long pattern of behaviour before the full force of feeling follows. Often it takes a long pattern of behaviour reversal before feelings are finally reversed.

One of the things that confounds me and trips me up on a daily basis is that it’s easy to know how I feel in a given moment (it’s a simple gut check :- ) but truth is not necessarily so apparent. One of the daily struggles of the Christian faith for me is to constantly remind myself that I have to seek the truth.

Of course, this is in no way an exclusively Christian dilemma – how many parents have told their children,

“You don’t feel like it? Do it anyway.”

A Russian politician is beguiled into indiscretion by a pretty girl who ultimately proves to have:

• A video camera
• An ulterior motive

Says Mr. Yashin (from the linked BBC story),

“She was pretty and I fell for her and behaved like any single young person would.”

“I didn’t suspect anything until drugs and sex toys were brought out. Instinctively I felt something was wrong and left.”

But it was already too late. Enough embarrassing footage had already been filmed.

I think we’re all familar with the story. This story is incredibly old. This story is incredibly proven. This story was working long before there were ever Russians or politicians.

If you need leverage over a man… you need a pretty girl.

But why does this story of entrapment work? How come it continually plays out like this? I can think of a thousand postmodern, enlightened reasons why this absolutely, positively shouldn’t work. But it absolutely, positively does. And, in my heart of hearts, I believe it will never stop working.

Not on everyone, not in every instance… but it will always work in scale.

There are a few key elements needed for this story to work.

• The man has to chase the pretty girl
• The man has to do something shameful
• The general public has to condemn the man

If the man stayed home that night – no story.
If the man and the girl feed cookies to the park ducks – no story.
If the public said, “Whatever” – no story.

But the evidence here says that there is a story, and the question is, “Why?”

Why are we willing to chase the girl (or the money, or the status)?
Why are we willing to do something indiscreet and shameful?
Why do we, as a public, condemn something in a leader that is so incredibly common?

Note – there’s at least one question that Mr. Yashin would disagree with here. He doesn’t see anything shameful in what he did. Interesting.

In any case, there is a mystery here to ponder.
It’s truly bizarre – if it’s wrong why did he do it, and if it’s not wrong, why is able to cause his downfall?

At the very least, we should be getting smarter about these things… and we’re not.

I’m sure there are thousands of little German boys who would have given anything to be in Robert Enke’s place – the first-choice goaltender for the German national football team.

But on Tuesday, he threw it all away when he walked in front of a train.

Thousands of people are willing to point at something  like that: “There is the most valuable thing.” but to him it didn’t mean that much. To him there was something more important… but tragically, it was missing.

What he saw must have been vastly different from what everyone else saw. More likely is that things were crowded out of his vision – that he couldn’t see what everyone else did, because he was preoccupied with something else.

Have a prayer for his widow and for his daughter.

I’m immensely proud of being the #1 site for the search terms, “anglican funk” on Google. (It used to work without quotes, but now it only works with quotes.) It’s me, babe.

But when my confidence is based almost exclusively on funk, its not hard to… ah… break it down.

I used to be the only hit for the quoted version. Now a plethora of spam blogs have the term.

I used to be the #1 hit for the non-quoted. Now I’m not even in the top ten hits. I’m not even in the top ten pages of hits.

It was nice while it lasted, but ever since the post left the first page of the blog the rankings went south. I could give it a page with a permanent URL and then I think it would stick around for a while.

It’s a reasonably simple question to ask, “What am I proud of?”

But the question “What would it take for that to come crashing down?”

… that’s disquieting.

This has a nifty side-effect… She’s always friendly when greeting and talking, because until she draws someone into conversation, she’s not quite sure who they are. They could be anyone, and wouldn’t it be terrible if she offended them

I don’t know what this is like, because I see faces perfectly. But I have a different problem.

I have difficulty seeing people.

Oh, I see roles just fine. Boss. Store clerk. Friend.
I’ve got no problems with personalities. Shy. Choleric. Outgoing. Reflective.
Interests and hobbies are a snap. Musician. Soccer nut. Book worm.

All too often, when it comes to the person behind these things, my vision goes blurry.

I don’t mean to pick on Adriano. I’ve pointed to him before. But I guess I point to him because he’s a person that I see. At least, I know there’s a person there. It sounds terrible to say it, but often this isn’t the case. I interact with roles, personalities and hobbyists and never even acknowledge the person behind them.

In the general hierarchy of people who are difficult to see, Adriano occupies a spot in the upper echelon. He’s a towering pedestal away. An icon, a figure, a larger-than-life painting whose words I never hear directly, but which only come through the the envoy of the press.

But somehow, he’s broken through to me.

It’s Good Friday today.

I think Jesus was only ever able to die for people because he was able to see people.

If he could see people… maybe I should give them a second look.

Peace be with you.

…the message read: “I’ve had enough. I’m fed up with this horrid life… Always the same. People are laughing at me… No-one sees my potential… I am scared, I have weapons here, and I will go to my former school tomorrow and then I will really do a grilling.” 

Why report anything else on the story? Everything you need to know is right here, in the boy’s own words.

If you live in a world where life is horrid, frightening and hopeless,  what are you going to do? We can only react to the world we believe in. 

If you’re a subject of mockery and ridicule you’re nothing. If you stare down the world with a gun in your hand, you’re a man.

Did anyone ever show him something different?

“Losing his father, as Adriano told me last year in an interview for Sports Illustrated, had a delayed but devastating effect on his career. Pleasing his father had always been one of his driving forces to succeed in football.

“Now he even considered the idea of giving up the game. With little motivation and lots of temptations, he was filling the void with alcohol.

“For a while his career was in the balance. There may be the odd slip along the way, but he says now that he can accept that his father is no longer around, that he has learnt from his excesses, and that happiness lies in simple pleasures – like kicking a football.” [Emphasis mine]

We are only ever as strong (and sustainable) as our reasons for doing stuff. This is why egotistical aid is a bad idea.

“But I wonder how many kids watching these attackers in action might think that playing Rambo in front of a world audience is more fun than a game of street cricket.”

It’s all about choices, and about which choices we perceive are available to us. While I’m not crying, “Victim! Victim!” (a free-will choice remains a free-will choice, after all) it’s a simple fact that if someone has an obvious choice in front of them, you can’t be overly surprised (or judgemental) when they take it.

Often this reason is centred around avoiding things we don’t like. However, it’s rare that we’re ever aware enough to be honest about this, and it’s somewhat shocking when you run across it in clear text.

From Dave Winer ,

“I’ve learned if I say nothing that gets me the least angst. So that’s what I usually do, say nothing. And every time I do it, my blood pressure goes up a teeny bit, and another hair either falls out or goes gray. Or maybe it goes gray and then falls out.”

Dave probably wouldn’t tie this to issues of personal brokenness, but it’s a remarkably clear example of how we struggle with things in unspectacular fashion, on a depressingly ongoing basis.