There is a story about a brother from a small town who visited his brother that lived in a busy, loud city. There were noisy cars and trucks driving and buildings being built. Despite this, the brother from the small town heard birds chirping and noticed a nest.
This is what prayer is like. Even though an environment may be loud, prayer has a way of quieting things and making us more attentive to what God is trying to say. Because prayer is so important, it may be a good idea to temporarily pause church programs to focus on spending time listening to God as a community.
Prayer is beneficial for many reasons.
It gives us vision, which is a picture of the future that produces passion in you and gets you working.
The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even–heaven help us–Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way…with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, “if not now, then when?” if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, “if not us, then who?” And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?
N.T. Wright
It helps us recognize the conviction of the Holy Spirit instead of dwelling on shame we feel for sin.
To be born of the Spirit is to step into a freedom that we never imagined before. It is to trust that the Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves, and that we can therefore relinquish our smaller identities to become someone who is beyond our own understanding
Robert A. Jonas on Henri Nouwen’s “Discernment”
It helps us notice the “inflection points” of our lives where God may be trying to get our attention.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
It helps us lament missed opportunities where God was pushing us in a direction, but we decided to go a different way.
Some of the words from my poem, The Sound of Birds, help describe this.
If I would have known
That was the last day I’d see you
I would have walked a little longer
Listened a little better
And not rushed through the day
I would have heard more birds and noticed their colours
We would have talked more about philosophy, sports and family
I wouldn’t have thought so much about me
Thoughts 