The Prayer You Were Never Taught

Asking comes first. It comes from wanting, not from history. A person cries out because he wants, before he knows if anyone will answer.

Chapter 1. The Prayer You Were Never Taught

Matthew 26:36–46

There is a way of teaching prayer that cuts the prayer in two.

On one side of the prayer, you ask. You come with a want. You bring it up out of your chest, and you say it. You tell God the thing you need.

On the other side of prayer sits surrender. This is the move when the want does not arrive. This is when you let go. You bow your head. You say the words that hand the prayer back.

This teaching creates two rooms. You occupy one or the other. While your asking is strong, you occupy the first. When your asking falters, you cross into the second. Surrender becomes the room you enter after the want has faded. It is the last stop on the far side of a hope that did not materialize.

I want to name that for what it is. It is a false choice, and it has been dressed up as maturity for a long time.

You have heard that mature believers stop seeking their desires. You have been taught the deepest prayer is the one that no longer wants. The wanting gets filed under the childish part. You are told that you graduate from need into acceptance, and that growth is what matters.

I want to be fair to what you were taught, because it was not meant to mislead.

'Thy will be done' is the truest prayer there is—Jesus prays it in this very garden, and this whole book is walking toward it.

Paul learned to be content in want or plenty, and that was not him going numb.

The tradition behind the teaching is real and it is deep.

Here is where it went wrong on its way to you.

It kept the surrender and quietly threw away the want. It took 'thy will be done' and made it mean 'stop wanting'—when Jesus said it with the want still on fire in him.

The error is not in teaching surrender. The error is in teaching that surrender is the death of desire, when the man who prayed it best did no such thing. So I am not against teacher’s intention. I am against what was cut out of it before it reached you.

So, the choice comes to you as a rule. Either you ask, or you accept it. You do not get both. If you are still asking, you have not surrendered. If you have surrendered, you have stopped asking. The two are made enemies, and you are made to choose.

Look hard at what that rule does to a person.

It teaches him that his wanting is the problem. It teaches him that the pain in his chest, the very thing he needs to say most, is the immature thing, the thing a stronger man would have already laid down. So, he learns to swallow it. He learns to call the swallowing peace. And on the day his deepest wish is refused, he is left with only one door and told that to walk through that door is to stop wanting anything good to happen in their prayer.