by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Keith, you talk a lot about prayer being an important part of your life over the past forty-five years, particularly since you made a decision to try to surrender your whole life to the God Jesus called Father. I have two questions. First, how and when did you get introduced to praying? The other question is about whether the way you pray has changed or evolved over these many years. If so, how?
These are perceptive questions. I could (and may—but not now) write a book to deal with them. But for now I’ll just start by telling you about a time when I was a little boy, probably four years old. One night my mother was putting me to bed, and she changed our routine. She always sat on the edge of the bed and would leisurely ask me about my day and we’d visit. Then she would say a prayer. I have no memory of what she prayed about, but I loved her being present, and the sound of her voice.
But one night after the sharing time, she said, “Johnny*, God is listening for you to pray, to talk to him.”
I said, “You mean God is actually here in this room with us??”
Seeing the look of apprehension on my face, she said, “Yes, and he knows all about you, has forgiven you of your sins, and loves you very much.” Then, smiling, she kissed me on the forehead, tucked me in and left, leaving me in the dark with a thin shaft of light from the almost-closed door.
I looked up in the left-hand corner of the darkened room (somehow placing God there) and pulled the covers up to my neck. All I could think of were the nasty things I’d done in that room when I’d thought I was alone that I certainly wouldn’t have wanted God to know about. But then I remembered that mother had said, “…and he knows all about you, he’s forgiven you for your sins and loves you very much.”
So finally I whispered, “Thank you very much.” And my prayer life had begun.
As to how my prayer life changed during the next seventy-nine years, I don’t know when I realized various things about God and about myself. But I can say that for years, praying was something I did, mostly at night. But after the last member of my family died and I surrendered my entire life to God (not realizing how little I knew about my behavior and its effect on other people) my prayer life changed from just expression of gratitude and requests for help. I now wanted to be God’s person, so I began to ask God to let me know what I should do and to help me do those things. Later, after I wrote my first book and it was published in eleven languages, a lot of my prayers had to do with gratitude and a desire for guidance.
Then when I was forty-seven years old, there were serious problems and conflict in a marriage of twenty-seven years. I prayed for “solutions”—that would (I now realize) change my wife—although consciously I thought I was praying for our marriage to change. But I had developed a strange blindness that made it difficult (impossible) for me to see the extent to which I was out of touch with my own reality. I found myself giving God “weekends off” somehow.
Finally through a very agonizing divorce (primarily due to my self-centered, immoral behavior) I continued to pray, but the sense of intimacy with God was no longer real somehow.
After the divorce I began to try to find out who I now was. I had to face the fact that I drank too much and didn’t even want to quit. But finally in 1985 I went to a treatment center and there I learned about my intense self-centeredness, my addictive personality and my unconscious denial of unpleasant personal characteristics. Ironically I was praying the whole time, praying to be able to see the truth that was so baffling to me. Then at the end of treatment I had a gut-wrenching night of reality in which I vividly saw my selfishness and how much pain it had caused not only my first wife, but my children and some of my friends and business associates.
The resulting surrender of my life including all the previously denied “putting myself in the driver’s seat of my life where only God belonged” put me into an entire new place in my prayers. I had become more like a small child not knowing what to do with my life. There was a deeper quality of asking God what I should do and be. In addition to praying, I read the Bible and all kinds of books about recovery and the lives of people who had surrendered to God. And I consciously “took my hands off the wheel” each morning and listened harder for directions. I learned to ask for and trust people enough to take directions, to move toward recovery, and to share the larger awarenesses I was coming to in my daily attempts to live for God one day at a time.
During this period I prayed to discover God’s perspective concerning all of life—and for knowledge of anything else about which I might be in denial so that I could surrender the newly discovered deceptive and harmful thoughts and behaviors to God, asking him to help me remove them.
For about twenty-five years I lived in a world that I had not even known existed as I tried to help other people to find God, people who had never seen their own self-destructive issues of control and self-centeredness and the problems their blindness was causing. And since I was no longer hiding any areas of my behavior from myself or from God, my prayer life was much more tranquil. I felt peace and acceptance inside for the first time ever. During this time I traveled, spoke and wrote books in the field of codependence, control issues, the twelve-step spiritual process and business management. And although these were dramatic years of working with other troubled people in different countries, many of whose languages I did not speak, it was a time in which my prayer life became more who I was than what I did. Communication with God was often all through my days and nights.
Finally, I realized that although I was no longer recognized in airports or when attending public meetings, I was more at home with God, myself and people who were running from God (and secretly hoping God would catch them) than I was with many of the Christians I’d known.
During the last five years my prayer life has become more of a running dialogue with God that seems somehow natural for me. Prayer is not so much a series of staccato cries or requests for help as it is an attitude of intimate listening and sharing in a life in which I am learning how to love other people as I have felt loved by God and some of his other recovering children.
Almost every personal encounter becomes a chance to listen to and learn about the wonderful stories of all kinds of people. And sometimes now as an old man I can see small ways in which I can help some of them see the good things and value in who they are—things which self-centered parents (like me) may never have gotten around to telling them. All this is part of what I now see as my prayer life. And at the end of the day I feel inside like a little boy who has an intimate contact with a Daddy who created the whole game of life, about which I have an insatiable hunger to learn.
Lord, thank you for your invitation into a healing relationship with you. As I move through my days, help me to hear your guidance and feel your love and to learn how to share that life with other people. In Jesus’ name, amen.
***
“In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.”
– Matthew 6:14, The Message
“He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.”
– William Law (1686 –1761)
British minister and one of the writers/translators
of the King James version of the Bible
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
– Sören Kierkegaard (1813 –1855)
Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author
“Prayer may not change things for you, but it for sure changes you for things.”
– Samuel M. Shoemaker (1893–1963),
Episcopal priest, instrumental in the
founding principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.
* My first name is John.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith,
How come some people like you keep going into your inner life and wrestling with deep problems all the time and yet claim to have the Holy Spirit? I don’t do this, and I’m a happy committed Christian. My wife is like you and says I’m just not sensitive to spiritual things. But I know some great Christian leaders who say they don’t have to wrestle the way you do (and they imply that your faith must not be very strong if you have to wallow around inside yourself after you become a Christian).
How about this? Who’s right, you or them?
That’s a good question.
I believe that there are (at least) two basics types of personalities. One (of which I’m an example) is the person who must look at the inner struggles and the meaning of the darkness and light he (or she) sees within—almost for survival. I can no more help my need to find out what life behind my face is like—however scary the darkness or however unacceptable the discoveries—than I can stop breathing. When I became a Christian, I was told to confess my sins against God and other people and ask forgiveness. To do that I have had to go inside to recall how and when I had hurt other people and God (because I couldn’t remember many sins. And it was very difficult for me to go to people I had harmed, confess my sin against them and ask them and God for forgiveness. But when I finished that task, I experienced a new kind of freedom and love for other people and for God that I just hadn’t experienced before. And the big surprise was I even loved myself more easily.
Those of us who are like this often see the Gospel in terms of a struggle between light and darkness within. We come to God with the question (whether we can articulate it or not): “Will the light overcome the darkness or will I be overwhelmed?”
When we are grasped by the Living Christ inside where the world cannot see, we suddenly realize that we are loved and that the Light is and will always be victorious in the end. At such times we can live with and face more often the darkness within ourselves and in the world we see outside of ourselves. And we have a fresh passion to tell the story and sing the song that there is Light, Life and Hope in Jesus Christ, for those who are compelled to face the mystery of life.
On the other hand, there are many people (no one knows which group is larger because we don’t talk much about our inner fears and longings) who live their whole lives being primarily conscious of the world and people outside themselves. These men and women may get baptized and confirmed but not think much about what is going on inside their own lives and motives. Some of these may come to God in a different way if and when they experience first hand a situation or relationship they can’t control in their outer circumstances. But as long as they can’t see evidence that they are powerless to save themselves, they may not ever be aware that they actually need a savior. They feel that they can help God get his work done. And these people often get lots done in the Church and in the world and may become great leaders in the church.
But I think that for either group to claim that its way is the way is a kind of spiritual blindness and naiveté. For those of us who must go on the inner journey to discover and confess to God and ask forgiveness for their sins and harm we have caused in the past there is a Gospel of redemption and possible reconciliation with those we have harmed. And for those who—for whatever reason—are not compelled to open themselves to the depths within, I would bet that there is also a Gospel of Redemption and Love that I don’t understand (because of the amazing grace of God I have experienced when I didn’t even know what I needed). I just don’t know how those people discover the sins of the past that they have done or know what to confess and with whom they need to be reconciled. For years I had no idea that I was hurting the people I loved most with my self-centeredness, so I could not hear what it means to hear the words, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healthy.” (James 5:16)
Your question was who’s right—you or them (those Christian leaders who don’t have inner issues). I’m sorry I can’t help you. I feel closer to God and more at peace than I ever have but I am also more aware of the power of my self-centeredness and need to be right, and how much more I need God’s help in order not to try to fix people who are different from me.
Thank you for writing. I hope this is a good time in your life. If you ever find yourself having to deal with inner problems in your life or religion, write again. I might be able to help more then.
Lord, thank you for the wonderful diversity among your children and that you evidently love and communicate with every personality as each can hear you. Remind me when I need it that my way of approaching you is not the only way to approach you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Have you been loved well by someone? So well that you are secure that person will receive you and will forgive your worst fault? That’s the kind of security the soul receives from God. When the soul lives in that kind of security, it is no longer occupied with technique. We don’t condemn people who don’t do it our way. All techniques, spiritual disciplines are just fingers pointing to the moon. But the moon is the important thing, not the pointing fingers.
– Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs
I‘m hoarse from calling for help, Bleary-eyed from searching the sky for God.
– David, Psalm 69:3, The Message
I’m happy from the inside out, and from the outside in, I’m firmly formed.
– David, Psalm 16:9, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, some people at my church asked me to lead a Sunday School class, and I agreed. One Sunday recently the subject of living by faith came up. After I talked about a couple of my own experiences of faith, I was surprised by the reaction of some of the people in the class. Most of them had a very different idea about it and thought I was being too narrow and rigorous. I’m trying to live my entire life for God, and I began to doubt myself. Now I feel uncomfortable going back to teach for fear I might cause another argument. Yet I want to be free to say what I think God wants me to say. Have you ever had a hard time standing for what you believe in?
Yes. I was converted in a car, alone, when I first tried to give my life to God. And because I hadn’t been in a tradition that even talked about “conversion,” I didn’t really know what had happened. But my experience of life was very different. For a long time after I became a Christian I did not speak about my faith publicly. But after a while people began to ask me to “tell my story,” and I began to travel and talk about the Christian life as it was unfolding in my own experience as a businessman.
This was a good experience, but a strange thing began to happen. As I traveled further and further from home, wrote a book, and spoke to larger groups, some people stopped treating me as an ordinary layman who had made an exciting personal discovery, instead reacting to me as if I were something other than a struggling Christian. And a few even started to treat me as some sort of “authority” or a “program personality” and to look after my personal comfort with great care and thoughtfulness when I was with them.
Naturally I found this very pleasant. And before long, without ever realizing it, I began to expect this little bit of special care and status being bestowed upon me. And, in retrospect, I noticed occasionally more than a tinge of resentment for those who invited me to speak and did not make “adequate” arrangements for me while I was in their city. After all, I thought, I was often exhausted, since traveling and being with people constantly is very tiring for me.
But one day when I was praying a new thought hit me about what was happening. I was becoming the thing I have rebelled against all of my life: a pampered professional “religionist.” With a kind of shocked reflection I could see what may sometimes happen to ministers, bishops, and traveling evangelists. People seal them into a sort of emotionally padded traveling compartment and pass them from one religious group or situation to another. They do not treat such visiting pros at all the same way they treat so-called “regular” people.
And after a while the effect can be very corroding to the speaker’s integrity. At least it was for me. At one level or another I began in self-defense to fit the expected role of being a religious authority, instead of just being a person who wants to live out his or her life trying to find and do God’s will in the nitty gritty business of ordinary living. And to the extent to which I surrendered to this temptation to be “outstanding,” I felt uneasy, and woke up one day realizing I might be on the brink of becoming an “approval-holic:” hooked on constant favorable attention and approval like an alcoholic gets hooked on alcohol. And when I move in that direction—wanting to fit the role that people expect— it subtly affected the content of my speaking as well as its freshness. Looking back, I’ve heard myself toning down the unpleasant aspects of what I am discovering about my own sin and selfishness. Finally, I realized that I was accentuating the points that affirmed the existing beliefs and prejudices of the group to whom I was speaking. I caught myself justifying the whole procedure by telling myself that I should “be gentle and go slowly with people.” And of course there is an important truth in that.
Several ministers over the years have told me in one way or another, “Keith, I really believe in a serious committment of one’s whole life. But my people are not ready for that kind of commitment yet, or that kind of confrontation.” So they admit they preach something less than the best they know and have experienced, because they are afraid people “are not ready” for the best.
But when this happened to me recently and I said these same words to myself, I discovered that the meaning hidden behind the words in my case was that it was I who was not ready to risk a certain group’s rejection of me if I said things that were too threatening to their beliefs…and thus to the status quo. And I was horrified to see whenever I spoke from the perspective of that “ non-threatening, no-risk” mindset— for that occasion I became what the scriptures call a “false prophet”—more interested in approval and admiration than in speaking any creative, freeing truth God had given me for which people “might not be ready.”
But the tragedy was that with all of my recognition of and rebellion against these things, I sometimes still find myself very subtly doing them. At the time my reasons seem so sound, and sometimes I realize they are sound. And often I catch myself, come out of denial, and am able to speak the truth as I see it. And I’m grateful that I am part of a small group of people who meet regularly to deal with these kinds of fears, and from whom I receive encouragement and help to be more real and loving
But here in this time of prayer I know that often I am still full of myself and concerned about what people think of me. And even with the incredible increase in my willingness to face my faults and sins, I know that in an instant I can become again a living example of the problem for which Christ died.
A Prophet:
“He broke fresh ground—because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation—a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand; a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind loving…”
– Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
Character or Tolerance?
“All too easily we confuse a fear of standing up for our beliefs, a tendency to be more influenced by the convictions of others than by our own, or simply a lack of conviction—with the need that the strong and mature feel to give full weight to the arguments of the other side. A game of hide-and-seek: when the devil wishes to play on our lack of character, he calls it tolerance, and when he wants to stifle our first attempts to learn tolerance, he calls it lack of character.”
– Ibid
Lord, help me to begin again with your strength and Spirit, and to be one of the free and honest loving children of your family. Help me to speak whatever you would have me say—and not to try to please important or “brilliant” people. Allow me to transmit something of the love and creative courage you showed us in Christ to people I meet today. Forgive me when I am afraid to chance rejection or failure to tell people about your amazing love and forgiveness. But thank you for the times I am willing to risk being honest and lovingly vulnerable. May there be more and more of these times. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
“We had just been given rough treatment in Philippi, as you know, but that didn’t slow us down. We were sure of ourselves in God, and went right ahead and said our piece, presenting God’s Message to you, defiant of the opposition…. Be assured that when we speak to you we’re not after crowd approval—only God approval.
– Paul, the Apostle
1 Thessalonians 2:2-4, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Honesty, Weekly Devotional
Last week I wrote about the surprising difficulty I faced in trying to change a lifelong self-defeating behavior—being late to meetings. This week I want to tell you the story of what has happened since I admitted my problem and asked God to help me solve this irritating and frustrating habit. Dealing with this one foible is literally transforming my life—at age eighty-three—and giving me the courage to move ahead where I was stuck.
If you didn’t read last week’s blog you may not be able to understand the profound effect that changing one “small” bad habit has had on my whole life. I feel a little like the person who bought some andirons for their fireplace. They were attractive andirons but they made the fire screen look shabby by comparison. So a new fire screen became a necessity. Then the fire screen made the carpet and the drapes look old so—you know the rest of the story—changing out one small item, an andiron in the fireplace, led to the redecoration of an entire house.
For me, committing to let God help me deal with this one grundy little habit has led to my coming out of denial about the fact that I have been late to all kinds of meetings—even church, social, medical and business meetings—and that this has been a lifelong habit. Also these discoveries have led to some profound spiritual revelations about all of my life.
Here’s how this “momentous drama in a teacup” has unfolded. After a number of days of being on time for the noon meeting, I became aware that during this time I have also been on time for church meetings and other appointments in ways I haven’t been before. I began feeling pretty good about myself. But then one busy afternoon I lost track of time. When I finally did look at the clock, I saw I was late to a meeting. I decided to face the music by going to the meeting, even though it would be half over by the time I got there. I had also decided not to defend my pride by making an excuse—even though it could have been seen as a legitimate excuse—because of two things. One, I wanted to see what it would be like to face the music about failing in my attempt to change this lifelong habit in front of the very people I had told I was trying to change it. And the second reason is that by this time I was simply sick of making excuses.
The only vacant seat in the room was right up front, so I could not avoid being seen as tardy. I detected a few knowing smiles as I walked over to the chair, but as I felt the beginning heat of a shame attack, I silently prayed, “Thank you, God, for giving me the courage to trust you with my pride.” And as soon as I had silently prayed those words, the shame was gone! I realized that by facing one simple failure of intent openly, I was somehow free from the fear of failing to be on time—at least for the moment. I realized that I would fail to be on time occasionally. But I was still elated because I realized something the rest of you probably already know: by going public and telling the very people (some of whom were personally distracted by latecomers) that I was going to try to let God try to change a habit that I knew was rude and distracting to people who paid the price to be on time, I had been able to be on time for almost a month. And that’s the only meeting I was late to in over two weeks.
But an even bigger discovery God has dropped down my chimney is that the big locked doors in my life often swing on very small hinges. If I will oil the hinges by making one radical commitment to begin and surrender my life around that small issue, I may become able to adjust my thinking so that I am on time other places without my having to agonize over it. What I’m trying to say is that when I can ask God to help me solve some lifelong small irritating problem, I may find the courage to believe that I can finish doing major things on my plate—like writing the book Andrea and I have been working on for four and a half years. I have been afraid, recently, that I’ll die before finishing this book.
I now recognize that if I do die before finishing this book I will have had the thrill of learning some amazing things about the way God operated in the Bible story to give people the courage to trust Him, so that he can guide them to be the free and loving people he designed them to be from the beginning. I sincerely hope that I get to live long enough to finish and share that book with you, but if I don’t, at least I have had a small taste of what it might mean to begin living as an authentic child of God in the impossible hidden areas of my life.
Lord, thank you that it’s never too late “to find the keys to the car,” never too late to give the keys to You and begin letting You take me where You want me to go. This is a strange paradox for me that I don’t understand. But the fact that You have once again let me see how I have unknowingly put in denial things that I don’t think I can change…and evidently don’t think You can’t either. I do love You and I surrender my life in this moment to You once again. And I pray that the people reading this will have a good day. Amen.
“Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Politician, Author, Scientist,
Then Jesus turned to the Jews who had claimed to believe in him. “If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you.”
– John 8:31-32, The Message
