The question of God’s existence was answered when God pu his feet on planet earth…the knowablity of God was established when Jesus stretched out hands and feet to die for us. This brought* reconciliation* between God and his people, bringing peace and pardon with the Father.
The most recent podcast (recording) of our Sunday service is now online. We are meeting once a month at the Days in Hotel on Rt 18; those get recorded. The rest of the time, we’re meeting in homes, the messages of which shall ne’er be posted on the interweb; they will live on in the hearts of those present 
Soooo…come join! If not, here are the web ways to follow us:
- The Jacob’s Well podcast is up and running and you can subscribe to that and our articles feed (get your extra sauce digital) is on the “web site here”: http://www.jacobswellnj.org/resources/our-feeds/.
- Also, the message from the weekend with notes and audio (download or play on the site) is “available here”: http://www.jacobswellnj.org/sermon/cynical-hope-peace/ – please feel free to share or check it out if you were away this past Sunday.
- We also have a Facebook page so feel the freedom to “become a fan” – you can also follow us around on Twitter –
reidSmonaghan and jacobswellnj (updated less frequently) if tweeting is your thing. I admit I enjoy the twitterverse a bit.
Evan and I started roasting our new coffees! The El Salvador coffee, which we finished roasting a few hours ago, is called a Pacamara. It is unique because it is HUGE. The picture (below) has a Pacamara bean that I roasted next to a normal sized coffee bean that Starbucks roasted:
In addition to noticing how much darker the Starbucks bean is, you might also note that our Pacamara could eat two or three normal size beans! Assuming it had a maw and stomach roughly the size of its whole body… Anyway, we’ll let the beans ‘rest’ overnight, and then taste them tomorrow. If I have time before I hit the road for Nashville, I’ll put the tasting notes up here. Ciao.
“It’s hard to pray.” These words appear in the Foreword to Paul E. Miller’s A Praying Life. Although he did not write them, they capture the essence of his book: Prayer is difficult, but possible; and it is absolutely essential.
1. Prayer is difficult.
I, Ben Schellack, have a hard time praying because…
- …praying is really awkward. How do I sit? Do I sit? Should I kneel? I usually kneel, but what do I say? Should I be quiet? My mind wanders. I bring it back, but it wanders again. After I a while I start dozing off, only to startle myself awake and feel guilty. ”I’m sorry G, I’m no good at this. I’ll try again tomorrow.” Maybe.
- …I can’t hear God. I hear my thoughts. How do I tell the difference? Sometimes things come to me out of the blue, but that could be random firing of neurons in my brain. Sometimes I get a warm feeling in stomach, but couldn’t that just be the tacos I took the night before? Is it really a relationship if there’s only one of us talking?
- …I’ve prayed and haven’t gotten answers: “…quiet cynicism or spiritual weariness…develops in us when heartfelt prayer goes unanswered” (14). I’ve prayed to find things before that simply disappeared. Maybe I shouldn’t pray for little things. But, I have a friend who’s had a crappy life. Some of it was his fault, but a lot of it was because other people did terrible things to him. He prayed to be rescued from those things, but help never came. The only help he got was when he helped himself. Where was God?
- …I don’t think it’ll make a difference. If God is good and in control of everything, isn’t he going to do what’s right anyway? Or, OK, I prayed for Y to get healed of her flu, but she probably would’ve gotten better anyway. Wasn’t it the shots that made her better?
- …I don’t always (and, really, hardly ever?…!) feel love towards God. Sometimes I’m just tired. Other times, I’ve done something sinful, and you know what, I don’t feel guilty or repentant. Most of the time, God just feels absent.
- …I don’t pray much, and I’m getting along fine in life.
I’ve thought all these things before; some of them I’m thinking now: “Praying…uncovers our doubts” (15).
2. Prayer is possible.
I’m not always the best conversationalist; I really suck on the phone. Reading books about conversation, would help me get better. But,the best thing for me to do would be to converse and call. Prayer, like conversations and telephones, is a medium. While we should pay attention to them, they are tools. Like a windshield for driving, they enable us to do something. If we become overly preoccupied with them, however, we will crash: “consequently, prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center” (20).
OK. So who is God?
The early Christian, Paul, wrote this to a church in the city of Corinth:
‘…I will be a Father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me’, says the LORD Almighty. 2 Cor 6.18
What does that mean for us? The beautiful truth that God is your Father, and you can “have access to your heavenly Father through Jesus. You have true intimacy, based not on how good you are but on the goodness of Jesus. Not only that, Jesus is your brother. You are a fellow heir with him” (17).
Which is all nice in theory. But what does mean to have an intimate relationship with someone I cannot see? I get it in my head, but not in practice.
It means a couple things, however. If God is…
- …God, God is sovereign, loving, wise, and patient. That means he’s in control of everything,1 he’s shaping my life for good, he’s not going to do everything I want, and he’s going to take his time at it. If you think about it, we have no reason to worry, but we have every reason to watch. God is making a story out of our lives: “People often talk about prayer as if it is disconnected from what God is doing in their lives. But we are actors in his drama, listening for our lines, quieting our hearts so we can hear the voice of the Playwright” (22).
- …our Father, God is a person. He’s not a magical answer machine or an some distant, impersonal force: “So, don’t hunt for a feeling in prayer. Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person” (21, italics his). Rather, as our Father, he wants to do things for us, he likes when we ask for things, and as our Heavenly Father, he will always do what is best for us. That means, we can hope, knowing in the end, because Jesus remained faithful, God will restore us.
- …Jesus, our Lord and Savior, will use prayer to teach us that we are jacked up (in theological terms, sinful), that we must be at prayer where the world is in pain (we will want to do what God is doing, which is redeeming the whole kosmos), and that we will suffer (Jesus, God himself and our hope, was murdered, after all).
That’s the theoretical stuff. What does it mean? Well, when you pray, ask if you’re treating God like a person, like a child before his/her Father, if you’re engaging with what God cares about, if you’re suffering, if you’re becoming more aware of your sinfulness. If not, how can you be more child-like, more dependent, more relational (treating God like a person), watching instead of worrying, being more involved, suffering more, growing in the Fruits of the Spirit (see Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, chapter 5).
3. Prayer is absolutely essential.
Reading the book will nail those points in. For me, it felt like my life was a wet towel that was getting twisted and drained. It hurt, but I feel more ‘ready’ to meet the goods and bads of life and closer to the One who is at work in my life. I’ll illustrate with a story.
I taught a class last Wednesday that went terribly. All the dry erase markers went dry, so I couldn’t work on the board. The students had blank looks on their faces, but I couldn’t slow down because the company I work for requires me to get through all the material. Worst of all, I blanked out in the middle of a problem. I had no idea what was going on for several minutes, because I didn’t write down my work ahead of class. I just stood there while everyone stared. Awkward.
Worst of all, the students did not seem to be learning much.
I prayed about all this ahead of time, but my prayers didn’t get answered? Was this God telling me to get out or was this God just letting me fail? If this had happened a year ago, I guarantee you I would have quit. Heck, if this had happened a month ago, I would have been pissed at God. Why did that have to happen?!? If you’re in control you could have done something about it!
One of the most helpful points in Miller’s book, though, came to mind as I was driving home. I had expectations that my class would learn. In reality, they weren’t learning as much as I had expected. Expectations and reality were diverging; the space between was a desert, and it sucked. 
But those deserts are part of life. The question is how do we respond to them: Do we get cynical? Do we deny reality? Do we run (my tendency)? Or, do we stay there and cling to (often yelling at) God? When we do that, they become something God uses to shape us. Even though life hurts, God is still our loving Father. Even though I failed, I am still his son…part of his royal family. He is still sovereign, patient, loving, and wise. He is still taking care of me. Why then would he let me fail? Maybe because I don’t deal well with failure. I don’t do it often. Maybe because I define myself by my performance, and depend on it for my happiness. Maybe God is teaching me that performance doesn’t define me.
Those thoughts came to me powerfully, when I was driving home. Were they random firing of neurons? No. Nothing is random. Were they indigestion? Maybe, but they fit Scripture, and they resounded as truth when I shared that experience with some brothers and sisters in Christ.2
I think God was teaching me to fail. And, I was so happy when I realized Jesus was directing things, shaping me, and honoring himslf that I sang all the way back to New Brunswick.
1 This relates to the question, “Why pray if God’s going to do/not do it anyway?” We can make it more pointed, “Why do anything at all if God is going to make it happen/not make it happen anyway?” If we have that doubt about prayer, we should have it about all our lives. Yet, we continue to do things. We have to. The simple (but infuriating) truth is that God is in control, while we are responsible. We live life between those two poles: God’s sovereignty…human responsibility. They should comfort us (if we love Jesus) and terrify/excite us (because we are responsible!).
2 Scriptures+Church are indispensable for determining God’s voice. If I don’t know Scripture, I won’t know if it’s indigestion, neurons, or God. Likewise, if Idon’t have a church, I won’t know if it’s my interpretation or God’s. Read the Bible and get in a church, kids.
I realized today why I’ve taken a 6+ year hiatus on singing and guitar. I’m not going to share the reasons here, but if you visit my housemate, Paul Helms’s, blog, you’ll hear one or two reasons. Scroll down to the bottom to hear us playing around with “Falling Slowly” by The Swell Season. (Bennett, I apologize for the unharmoniousness of our harmonies.)