resemble God's people pray. Usually, our prayers are asking for help in some way, it may well be the only time we ever admit dependence on anyone or anything. We look for the recipe that will somehow get a good answer to our prayers. Weary with life's troubles, we get weary in prayer. (IB 308) Perhaps faith does not find God except on the last edge of helplessness,  Success maybe, but yes to perseverance and fortitude in prayer.  Praying like politics can be the slow boring of hard board in the story. Ps. 44 wonders if God is asleep and uses its prayer to rouse the sleeping god to justice and action. Early in the movie The Apostle, Robert Duval's Pentecostal pastor character comes to an accident scene and prays through the window of the crushed family in the ruined car. The woman's hand moves. He goes back to his car and tells his mother, Mama we made news in heaven today, yes we did

 

Even the early church struggled with prayer. Jesus dealt with unanswered prayer in the Garden. Jesus would resemble the widow in the parable in the Garden.The widow demonstrates power disparity and the temptation to despair when no one could or would help. The story does not ask us to make analogies to God but to have us move from the lesser to the greater   Prayer may feel like pounding on a locked door.Dylan had a song years ago, knocking on heaven's door. Prayer can be pounding on heaven;'s door. I never thought that I would live to see the Berlin wall fall peacefully. It did, and that utter surprise may have had some of the countless prayers for peace to thank.So, the unfit judge cannot be equated to God but can still do right, even though he is not virtuous. We don't know why she is not heard, maybe it's one more person looking for justice when he is waiting for a bribe. Instead, he is fed up with her constant pleading, literally so she won't strike me or wear me out.=keeps giving me a black eye.

 

 

Gen. 32 prayer as wrestling, with purpose, with oneself (see Janzen-old grabby self and a new one ends in dislocation-the words in Hebrew play with the ordering and the sounds-new name-new birth in baptism-alienated from the true self) One of the things we wrestle with is a slow answer to a prayer-we wrestle with what seems to us to be uncommon slowness, like drumming our fingers when the ATM doesn't spit out bills immediately,and the divine timetable. Wrestling prayer can be exhausting, not polite mere feigned emotion. Prayer does not leave us unchanged. Patience as a virtue lost.Having it out with God may leave us with a bit of a limp. I think of Robert Duval in the Apostle, yelling "I love you Lord, but I'm mad at you." We don't need to nag God who knows and wants good for us. Persistent prayer teaches us about the flow of time and to learn patience in the sense of forbearing/long suffering/enduring with God amid trouble.

 

Our Greek Orthodox sisters and brothers pray with images, icons. It is noteworthy we use the word to speak of old entertainers now. Praying hands evoke the spiritual sense in me. I have always liked the Grace and Gratitude pictures by Eric Enstrom or the praying hands of Norman Rockwell's freedom of religion piece of the four freedoms set. We all received a living tableau of persistence and rescue from Chile this week. For some time, miners were trapped in what col miner grandfather called the bowels of the earth. Many prayed, and some gave the enacted prayer of presence

day after day at the entrance. They waited for a rescue capsule to arrive on the surface. Think of prayer as sending messages from below ground up to God's presence, as we wait for the rescue capsule to bring us back to a safe place together.