Does prayer change things? Or us? Or both?

I don’t know many people who say they have achieved a life of perfect balance. Maybe none.

I certainly struggle to give the competing pulls of my life their ordered, rightful place. Email, meetings, phone calls, sermons to prepare, people to whom I want to be available—all that takes center stage most days. But I also know the value of sometimes not doing. So while I like getting things done, and it’s true that I keep a full schedule, I also try to find a healthy, holy rhythm.

Bishop Mike Hill from Bristol, England, is teaching and preaching this week at the church I serve. He was telling some of us how hard it is to keep work and rest in balance. Even Jesus, with crowds clamoring after him, seemed to have to give attention to this balance when facing the constant demands and the overwhelming needs.

Then Mike said something that also struck me, an insight he had gotten from author and pastor Andy Stanley. Stanley has concluded that the struggles to keep in balance work and rest, activity and prayer, will always be tensions to manage more than problems to solve.

That seemed freeing, indeed. I already know I won’t keep a perfect balance or an always-satisfying rhythm. I will get out of whack. And usually not in the direction of praying too much! It helps me to remember that that reality may always something be I wrestle with. Even Jesus had to guard with determination a moment of restful breathing and quiet amid the squeeze and noise of the throngs.

I shared with Mike something that has helped me, too. How some say prayer is not simply preparation for the work (the important things). It often is the work. Getting on our knees becomes a vital way God accomplishes his purposes through us.

And I thought back to something author and seminary teacher Haddon Robinson wrote that has always struck me. For Jesus, he said, praying was not preparation for battle; it was the battle. It was in crying out to God where he truly gained the ground. And we see that pre-eminently in the last hours of Jesus’ life.

"Where was it that Jesus sweat great drops of blood?" he asks, thinking of Good Friday’s harrowing events.

"Not in Pilate’s Hall," says Robinson, "nor on his way to Golgotha." That’s what we would think, off hand. But no: "It was in the Garden of Gethsemane," the place, in other words where Jesus prayed.

"Had I been there and witnessed that struggle," recounts Robinson, "I would have worried about the future. ‘If he is so broken up when all he is doing is praying,’ I might have said, ‘what will he do when he faces a real crisis? Why can’t he approach this ordeal with the calm confidence of his three sleeping friends [his disciples]?’ Yet, when the test came, Jesus walked to the cross with courage, and his three friends fell away."

Sometimes, when the demands mount and the time seems to slip inexorably away, I need to tell myself: What could matter more? It’s tempting, as I wrote in an earlier blog entry, simply to rush in, thinking it’s my perspiration, my gritty effort, my ingenious smarts that will carry the day.

But what if I more often let God get in a word edgewise, let God do for me what I cannot figure out for myself, let God have room to work? What if I spent more time laboring in prayer and less in frenzied effort? Might the balance and sanity mean more than my relentless effort to fix and finish?

I think of a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer, a prayer for a Sunday in Lent, a prayer that has helped me with all this before. Perhaps saying it again (and again) will help me now:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen. May it be so!