What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 125-126
Often, our deepest dream is an unspoken dream. We are unable to articulate it for fear that we are asking too much. God, listening with ears of the heart, is able to hear our unspoken prayer. Hearing this soul prayer and acting on it, God often seems to catch us by surprise. We do not expect to be taken as seriously as God seems to be taking us. When the Universe opens a door or two for us, we shy away.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 149-150
If you are going to enter this divine dance we call prayer, you have to surrender your desire to be in control, to figure out how prayer works.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 121
Majesty and humility are such an odd fit. This is one reason we struggle with prayer. We just don’t think God could be concerned with the puny details of our lives. We either believe he’s too big or that we’re not that important. No wonder Jesus told us to be like little children! Little children are not daunted by the size of their parents. They come, regardless.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 116-117
God is for all of us and for all of our most complex transactions. Dependency upon God is not childish. It is childlike — and we all know how quickly children can grow and transform. When we make ourselves childlike in relation to God, we open ourselves to similar growth and transformation. It is a paradox, but in striving to become as little children, we also become more fully adult. We open ourselves up to the root word response in the word responsible.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 141
As soon as I begin simply asking for help, I have become like a little child again. I’ve stopped becoming cynical. Oddly enough, my prayer is answered almost immediately because in the act of praying I’ve become like a child. The cure for cynicism is to become like a little child again. Instead of critiquing others’ stories, watch the story our Father is weaving.
To hear a good story, we need a simple, childlike wonder…. The cynic is never fooled, so he is never delighted.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 86-87
When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life. Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama. As you wait, you begin to see him work, and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 73
If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.
Time in prayer makes you even more dependent on God because you don’t have as much time to get things done. Every menute spent in prayer is one less minute where you can be doing something “productive.” So the act of praying means that you have to rely more on God.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 49
Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God any more.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 41
When we hide from God our true goals and agendas, we cannot really hide them, but we can prevent ourselves from enjoying the comfort of knowing that God is “on the case” and working on our behalf. We can rob ourselves of the comfort of an ongoing collaboration with God, in which we both try to work to meet “our” goals. The problem, of course, is that we often assume that our personal goals and God’s goals for us are at opposite ends of the table. We do not trust that our dreams come from God and that God has the power to accomplish them. Instead, we act as though every idea we have is born out of self-will, and even in the most willful of us, this is never the case. God inspires us with desires and dreams. God gives us goals and agendas. God is prepared to help fulfill our goals and dreams. One more time it comes back to the questions of prayer. When we pray, “Please give me knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry it out,” we are often shocked by the fact that what is clarified for us is some very personal intention. We pray for God’s will only to discover how sharply we long for a partnership of our own with another human being. We pray for God’s will, thinking we will be pointed toward heaven, only to find that we are pointed squarely back into our career with a clear idea of what it is that we must do next to move ahead further.
God is not otherworldly. God is not flaky and airy-fairy. God is grounded in reality, and as we pray to God, we become more grounded, not less. As we ask to have our life run by God, we become more comfortable, not less, with the actual details of that life.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 76-77