WB A Prayer for Faith
“Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.”
Lately, my daughter has been in the habit of stretching out her arms and saying in a silly voice with a thick Southern accent, “Daddy, can I have a hug?” We then embrace in a very funny way, usually with her clinging onto me like a koala in a tree. If she wasn’t nine years old and almost as tall as me, it would be adorable, but usually it threatens to knock me over.
Charles Wesley composed Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee, also titled A Prayer For Faith, in 1741. The poetry beautifully captures Wesley’s sense of longing for God’s embrace. The imagery conveys a weary and burdened soul, searching for rest and finding abundant life. It is a song I have needed to hear, a prayer I have needed to pray.
Prayer has been a safe haven for me during the anxiety of 2020. I know there’s as many ways to pray as there are different kinds of people, but I find the most meaning in two very different forms of prayer. I have come to love breath prayers, the deep breathing and repeating a phrase with each breath. “Jesus Christ,” (breathe) “Son of the Living God,” (breathe) “have mercy on me” (breathe) “a sinner.” I find this calms my soul and centers me on the presence of the Almighty God like a child is soothed by her mother’s lullaby. But I’m also a pacer and a processor, so I like to walk around my house and talk out loud to God, especially when I’m praying for others. When I pray like this, I feel as if I’m talking to an old friend who really cares.
Lately, my spiritual director has challenged me to think more about how I pray for myself. My prayers tend to focus on thanksgiving and petitions for others, but I’ve lost my language for searching for God. I discovered that I had been using an unhelpful and even harmful prayer language for myself for years, one based in a penitence that believed God was eternally unhappy with me, or ignoring me. I was always asking God to change me because I believed that at my very core I had no value. I have struggled off and on with depression, and my prayer life was not life-giving because I prayed as if God despised me, and I was trying to convince God to love me.
This hymn of Charles Wesley is helpful to my rediscovering a personal prayer life. It doesn’t devalue the singer, but places us in the context of a weak and weary child asking their father for an embrace. In its words I hear the Savior say, “come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I have become weary and burdened by the troubles of this world, this pandemic, this political climate, my own anxiety. This week I needed to draw a visual reflection of this life-giving hymn, one that for me translates the beauty and mystery of autumn. I wanted it to capture both the heaviness of Charles’ burdens, the sense of death that comes from laying our burdens down before the Lord, and then the playful and abundant life that is found through the resurrecting power of Christ.
This week, lay your armor and your burdens down at the foot of the cross. Stretch your hands to God, our Loving Parent, who loves you and values you and longs to give you rest. When you pray for yourself, may it be done in a way that adds to your sense of worth and holiness, for the Holy Spirit is at work in you at this very moment. May the peace of Christ be with you.