The Bible is Boring

Christians do a pretty good job of shaming each other on the Internet. Seriously. Tell me how many times you’ve seen this little gem:

Why do we sleep in church, but stay awake through a three-hour movie?

Why is it so hard to pray, but so easy to gossip?

Why are we bored when we read the Bible, but we can stay on Facebook all day?

It goes on longer, but you get the point: You should feel guilty because you like all this stuff more than you like the things of God. It’s nothing new. I think I remember seeing this in some form or another when I got my first email account and everyone was doing chain emails (ROLYAT_HOHO@juno.com if any spammers are reading). Years later, I still see it pop up on my Facebook feed from time to time.

It’s managed to hang around because, like any good Christian chain message, it does a good job tapping into our guilt. And many of the assumptions are true. Personally, I don’t have any more trouble staying awake in church than I do when watching movies (Fun fact – I’ve fallen asleep in the theater during Inception AND The Dark Knight Rises), but I do struggle with prayer and Bible reading. At least, it’s a lot harder for me to do those two things than it is for me to gossip and waste my day on Facebook.

And, despite what this guilt-trip message would have you believe, that’s okay.

It’s easy for me to get discouraged because I have trouble working on my faith. Maybe you’re the same way. Maybe your prayers peter out after a couple minutes. Maybe you do okay reading the first couple chapters of Genesis, but then you get to the “begats” and your mind starts wandering. And then maybe you beat yourself up, because if you were truly spiritual, you’d be able to talk to God for hours on end and burn through the whole Bible in an afternoon because you just can’t put it down.

But here’s the deal. Doing stuff that’s good for you isn’t always fun. Movies, gossip, and Facebook…well, those things are easy.

But fighting a sin nature to do things you know you have to do? That takes work.

I wake up at around 5:30 am two days a week so I can go to the gym. I never look forward to it. Every time my alarm goes off, all I can think about is how much I want to go back to sleep. But I drag myself out of bed and force myself to exercise, because it’s good for me. I do it early in the morning because I know that’s the time that will cut into quality time with my wife the least. And when I’m done, I’m glad I did it.

But it would be much  easier to sleep in on workout day.

It would be easier to eat nothing but Oreos.

It would be easier to sit on Facebook all morning instead of reading a few chapters in Joshua.

There are going to be days that prayer is refreshing and powerful. There are going to be days that the Bible captures your attention and you devour a passage like it’s the latest page-turner. But there are also going to be hard days. There might even be more hard days than easy ones. And that’s okay, because you don’t have to enjoy it for it to be good for you.

You just have to do it.

October 4, 2013September 4, 2014 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: Bible, christianity, discipline, prayer 2 Comments

Let’s Be Like This Girl

This picture was emailed to us by a Power FM listener. The girl in the middle is 9 years old, and she organized a prayer vigil for those affected by this weekend’s tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. I got this picture in my inbox, and all I could think was, “Man. This girl gets it.”

In the midst of all the heated arguments about gun control, mental illness, and the nature of evil, this little girl got her neighborhood to pray. She didn’t come up with a snappy 140-character quip. She didn’t find a way to show that something like this actually proves God’s existence. She did the only thing she knew to do when faced with trouble. She joined with fellow believers in prayer.

There’s a tendency lately that when stuff like this happens, we find ways to use the events to support our own personal soapboxes. If you were on social media much this weekend, you know that’s true. It’s like we forget our discussion starter was a life-altering tragedy to so many others.

I’m guilty of this. Christian radio folks in general have a nasty habit of taking stories like this and turning them into “show prep.” There are dozens of sermonettes to be pulled from tragedy, and it’s all too easy to turn something horrific into a segue for a “deep break,” all the while ignoring how much those affected are hurting.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about issues. I’m not even saying tragedy shouldn’t spur discussion.

I’m just saying I wish we were all a little bit more like this 9-year-old girl.

December 18, 2012December 18, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: christianity, connecticut shooting, newtown connecticut, prayer 1 Comment

Boring Provision

For the past several years, I’ve been fortunate to have some pretty cushy jobs. I’ve been working at a radio station for awhile now, and before that, I spent a few years working with computers at a high school. Both of these jobs involved lots of sitting and a healthy dose of air conditioning. I had worked difficult jobs before, complete with early hours, lots of standing, and no air conditioning, but those were part of my distant past.

Not anymore.

Now that I’m at a place in my life where working part time is not enough to pay the bills, I’ve picked up a second job at a pizza place. I spend most of the day on my feet, and by the evening things get pretty hectic. And pizza place hectic is very different from radio station hectic. I’m getting more and more used to it, but after a couple days of work I realized that all the air conditioning and padded seats had become my norm. I had been spoiled by great jobs.

I remember one night I was particularly exhausted. I didn’t see how I could make it through the week feeling as worn out as I did. So when 11:11 rolled around and I made my wish prayer, I asked God to give me the energy and strength to make it through the week. I fell asleep before I could say “Amen.”

The next morning, I woke up full of energy and ready to face the day. It was an answer to prayer. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it that way.  I thought, Of course I’m full of energy. I went to bed an hour and a half earlier than I normally do! It’s a good thing I did that. I haven’t felt any magic tingles that would indicate God’s supernatural energy flowing through me. Silly God.

Okay, maybe I didn’t think those last couple sentences word-for-word, but that was the underlying thought process. I got more energy by falling asleep earlier, not by God interfering in the natural order of life. Clearly, I had answered my own prayer.

Eventually, though, I felt convicted. I remembered the verse in James that says all good things come from God. All good things. Even answers to prayer that aren’t delivered by singing angels and fancy special effects. Sometimes, I get so caught up thinking about how big and supernatural God is that I forget he doesn’t have to answer every prayer in a way that’s obviously big and supernatural. God can answer prayer through little, ordinary things like an earlier bedtime.

It’s easy to write off the boring answers to prayer. We love sharing dramatic stories of God’s provision. When we can’t explain how something happened, it’s easy to point to God’s involvement. But when there’s an explanation – especially a perfectly natural and boring explanation – God fades into the background.

Have you ever written God off when he provided for you in a boring way?

February 28, 2012June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: christianity, devotional, prayer 1 Comment

Content Creation and Bible Study

My wife likes to give me a hard time because I’m always looking for opportunities to turn parts of our life into some new creative project. We’ll be fiddling around with our instruments, and I’ll say “Let’s record this and upload it to the internet!” She’ll say she’s thinking about trying a juice fast, and I’ll say, “Let’s document the whole thing and turn it into a blog/vlog series!” Sometimes she’ll just be sitting there, and I’ll say, “I just had the most brilliant idea for a novel!” I think she’s learning not to take me seriously half the time, but she still makes sure to poke fun at me. I think it’s one of her love languages.

The fact of the matter is I like to make things. I’ve written songs, hosted a radio show, edited a music video, and even tried to write a book or two. And then there’s this blog. I just love creativity. Because of that, I try to read up as much as I can on being creative. The funny thing is, the more I read, the more I find there is one central concept that content creators of all kinds tend to bring up at one point or another:

The best way to get better at creating content is to create content.

It’s so simple, but it’s so true. So many aspiring artists never really get into the game because they’re afraid of not being “good enough.” They sit there planning out their new project and perfecting the schematics more and more over time, but they never actually do anything with it. It just stays in their head.

I think this is one of those truths that applies pretty broadly. I once went two years without doing any sort of private Bible study and without maintaining any sort of prayer life. It got to the point where one of the reasons why I wasn’t going back was I knew I’d be rusty. I knew I’d been out of the game so long that my prayers would be awkward and my study habits would be lacking. So I didn’t do anything. My fear of not being good enough led me to complete spiritual immobilization.

How did I get out of that funk? I sat down and read my Bible.  As I predicted, I didn’t uncover any deep insights, and my prayer afterward was hardly eloquent. But I was already a step ahead of where I’d been. I had something to build on.

Question of the Week
Have you ever avoided spending time with God because you were afraid you wouldn’t be “good enough” at it?

July 28, 2011June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: bible study, christianity, content creating, creativity, prayer Leave a comment

Thank You For Popcorn

I really love children’s sermons. I’ve blogged about them before and tried to make a spiritual point, but even without all that serious stuff, they’re fun. The little kids are cute, they say funny things, and sometimes there’s one little guy who isn’t even paying attention because he’s busy making faces at someone in the congregation.

I remember one specific children’s sermon over thankfulness. After the woman finished giving her little speech on why we should always include times of thanksgiving in our prayer life, she had all the kids bow their heads and then suggested everyone thank Jesus for something. There were several prayers expressing thankfulness for Mommy and Daddy, for having a house, for Jesus dying on the cross…and then one kid totally stole the show.

“Dear Jesus, thank you for popcorn!”

The whole congregation broke out in laughter over that one, but to me it was a profound moment. It got me asking myself questions: When was the last time I thanked God for something like popcorn? Am I only grateful for the big things in my life? Why don’t I thank God for the way coffee tastes or the way music sounds?

Sometimes I get so caught up in thanking God for the big things – a job, a home, salvation – that I forget to thank him for the little things. Big things have a way of stealing the show. They become towering milestones that cast gigantic shadows over everything else that happens in our lives. But while it’s the big things that define the shape our lives take, it’s the little things that provide the colors.

And, quite frankly, I’m going to have a lot more little things than big things in my life to be thankful for. In fact, I have a whole cabinet full of microwave popcorn right now.

Question of the Week
What are the little things you thank God for?

July 13, 2011June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: children's sermon, christianity, devotional, popcorn, prayer, thankfulness 2 Comments

Groaning at God

One of my biggest regrets from my brief songwriting career is that the song I wrote about one of my favorite passages of scripture happened to be the worst song I’ve ever written. The lyrics were okay, I guess, but the music was just plain bad. My thought process was that if I waited until my songwriting abilities were good enough to do the passage justice, I could wait too long and the verse might not mean as much to me anymore. So I cranked the song out, and now I’m left with something that I really, really don’t like.

However, I still love the passage. Here it is:

…the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
(Romans 8:26-27)

Sometimes, when I pray I have this fear that God won’t hear my prayer if I don’t talk for long enough. Like there’s a risk that I could finish praying before he’s even noticed I was saying something. The problem is, sometimes I come up against something in my life that’s so big or so profound that I don’t know what to pray for. There’s no way I can pray for long enough because I don’t know what I can specifically ask God to do that will most effectively resolve the situation.

And a lot of the time, I think that’s my problem.

If I think the effectiveness of my prayer life is based on how eloquent and how long-winded I can be when I approach the throne of God, I’m severely misguided. If the Holy Spirit can help me out by groaning, then surely I don’t need to give God a rousing speech for my prayers to count.

The whole thing really is ironic. Asking God for things in prayer is all about acknowledging that you can’t accomplish something on your own. And then here I am thinking the length and eloquence that I can come up with will have some sort of impact on God’s response. Prayer is so much bigger than flowery speeches to the ceiling. It’s a powerful, even mystical process that I, for one, don’t think I fully understand.

And so, occasionally I try to let the Holy Spirit do some groaning for me.

Question of the Week
What does your prayer life look like? Do you ever feel pressure to make your prayers last longer?

June 29, 2011June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: christianity, holy spirit, prayer 1 Comment

Christianized Wishing

MAKE A WISH!

I received this chat message from my fiancee on Facebook at precisely 11:11 Sunday evening. At the risk of sounding like someone who tries too hard to Christianize everything, I’ve been working on turning the practice of making an 11:11 wish into a regular spiritual discipline over the course of the past year or so. I feel weird using a term like spiritual discipline – like this is something monks practice in addition to fasting and meditation – but when I look at what I’ve been doing, I feel like that’s the best term for it.

Here’s how it works: whenever I look at the clock and see that the time is 11:11, I pray for something small. I don’t pray that the people of an unknown culture would come to know Jesus or that cancer would disappear in people who have been given days to live. I pray that maintenance will come fix my toilet soon, or that I’ll get a decent night’s sleep tonight. It’s like my own little Christianized wish. This whole practice stems from one simple idea:

My prayers are too big.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with praying for big things. We need to be willing to bring the big, scary things of the world to God, and we need to believe that he cares enough and that he’s powerful enough to do something about them. But I wonder if sometimes we get too focused on praying for miracles. I wonder if it’s possible to pray too much for big things. If all we pray for are big things, then all we’re committing to God are big things. And if all we commit to God are the big things in our lives, then I wonder if we somehow subconsciously start to believe the big things are all that God cares about.

We need to be willing to bring the small, insignificant things of our lives to God, and we need to believe that he cares enough and that he’s powerful enough to do something about them. Do you believe that God cares if you get eight hours of sleep tonight instead of two? Do you believe that every now and then he works things out to make your life a little easier? Or do you believe he’s only interested in real problems like terminal illness, political unrest, and human trafficking?

I tend to believe the former. Because that’s what love is. Yes, love is being concerned with and trying to help with the big, difficult problems, but it’s also caring about the little things. It’s a pat on the shoulder in the middle of a rough day and offering to run to the store when life is just too busy.

Jesus tells us that God notices every time a sparrow falls dead out of the sky and that he makes sure the lilies are always dressed in their Sunday best. If God cares enough to make a bunch of plants look pretty, I think it’s safe to say he cares enough to do something little for his children every now and then.

Do you ever pray for “little” things? What sort of things do you pray for?

February 23, 2011June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: 11:11, christianity, prayer, spiritual disciplines, wishing 3 Comments

With or For?

I think I’ve mentioned before that this blog is, at its heart, an assignment for a class. That doesn’t mean that what I’ve written has been half-hearted or done merely out of obligation, though. I’ve really enjoyed sitting down and pouring out my thoughts. This is my last “assigned” blog, but my plan is to continue this site after class. I have relocated the blog to the URL you are currently reading it on. This web address is a little easier to remember (I hope), and the only difference is that my Twitter feed looks a little different. I know that’s probably heartbreaking to most of you, but I hope you can get over it for me. But enough of that. It’s time to move on to the meat of this blog:

Is it enough just to pray for people?

As Christians, we don’t have an easy life. Not if we’re doing it right. Paul tells us in I Corinthians 15 that if we’re wrong about Jesus and about Heaven, then “we are of all people most to be pitied.” He’s right. Christianity is all about doing the harder things in this life to improve our next life. And if Jesus isn’t resurrected and an eternity in Heaven isn’t waiting for us after we die, we’re just a bunch of people living a life of eternally delayed gratification.

But there are some perks to being Christians, even in this world. One of them is the line, “I’ll be praying for you.” I sure like saying it. Sometimes, someone comes up to you and just tells you about a really difficult situation in your life, and you really want to make things better, but you have no idea what to say. That’s when, as Christians, it’s so great to have that line in your back pocket. It’s easy to say, and everyone who hears it pretty much has to appreciate it. Even if they don’t believe in God. It’s a pretty big gesture to say, “Hey, I don’t know how to help you, but you know who does? The biggest, most powerful entity in existence. I’ve got connections with him, and I’m gonna see what he can do for you.” Pretty awesome, right?

But how often do we actually remember to pray for that person?

I know I’m too ashamed to try and count up all the times I told someone I would be in prayer for them and totally forgot about them in the next five minutes. I know that sounds heartless, but I’m willing to bet I’m not alone in this. Life is busy, and it’s too easy to get caught up in our own little battles when the huge battles of other people aren’t constantly in front of us. Because I know I’ll forget, I’ve tried to build a habit of silently praying for people as soon as I tell them I’ll pray for them. At least that way I don’t make a liar of myself.

But is there an even better way of going about this? I remember hearing a story about a guy who, when someone would tell him about a problem, instead of saying, “Hey, that’s rough. I’ll be praying for you,” he would say, “Hey, I’m a forgetful man, and I don’t want to forget your prayer request. Would you mind if I prayed with you right now?”

What if everybody did this? The idea scares me half to death, mostly because, like other people, I get very insecure praying in front of other people, which is especially stupid in this sort of situation. No one is going to judge your prayer when you take time out of your schedule just to stop whatever it is you’re doing and go to the throne of God with a difficult situation.

And there’s a strange communal power that exists in praying for someone. I got a taste of it last weekend when I participated in a 24-hour prayer vigil. When I came in to do my “shift,” the guy who was in there before me prayed over me – out loud – before he left the room. I had barely ever talked to this guy, but a couple days later I saw him walking by, and I realized I felt this weird connection to him. It was like the two of us had been a part of the same huge bonding experience. It dawned on me that this could only have come from the little thirty-second prayer he prayed over me just a couple days before. It was crazy.

I want to wrap up this blog with a suggestion. The next time someone tells you about a problem they’re facing in their life, don’t just say, “Hey, I’ll be praying for you.” See if you can get them to stop for thirty seconds so you can pray over them. Maybe the two of you won’t have the same inexplicable spiritual experience I had a week ago, but at the very least, you will have avoided using a cheap and empty line.

December 11, 2010June 11, 2012 by Taylor Categories: FaithTags: 1 Corinthians, prayer 1 Comment