On Praying Ground

I knew some dear old saints, while I was growing up, who would often speak about being "on praying ground." I had no idea, of course, what they meant; I just knew that they were at some honored, mysterious place where prayers were heard and answered. I understand now that they simply were confident that their hearts were in right relationship to God so that their prayers were not hindered, and their history with Him gave assurance of forthcoming answers.

It may be that in our high-speed, complicated world we make prayer something it is not intended to be. There is no lack of information about how to go about it. The WorldCat, a catalog of library collections worldwide, lists 62,307 titles on the subject of prayer, and you or I could probably access most of these through the interlibrary loan system of our local library. That super-abundance of material may lull us into thinking it is so easy that anyone can do it and write about it. Or on the other hand, we may have misgivings about something so difficult that many thousands of books aren't sufficient to instruct us.

In contrast to our present wealth of printed material, only a little over 1000 titles on prayer were available before 1900, about the time my saint-friends might have been reading about it. I doubt that very many of those available titles were owned by the fledging Carnegie Library in our area, or that very many of the farming-community folks frequented the library. So how did they learn to pray? They studied the Word of God, and tried to follow the examples they found there of effective pray-ers.

One such instance is recorded in the Gospel of Mark. A distressed father bought his son to Jesus, explaining that an evil spirit had possessed the child, rendering him unable to speak. Whenever the boy was under the spirit's power, he would become rigid and fall to the ground, foaming at the mouth and grinding his teeth. The father had asked the Lord's disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not. Now he was asking Jesus to do something "if He could." Of course He could! He rebuked the spirit, commanding it to release the child, and with shrieking and a great convulsion, it obeyed.

Later in private, the disciples asked Jesus why they had been unable to cure the boy. Although Jesus had chided them earlier for being "faithless," He did not mention their lack of faith again. He simply explained, "This kind can come out only by prayer"—and some translations add, "and by fasting." There is no indication that Jesus prayed long and hard or that He fasted for this deliverance—something we may believe we have to do if we really, really are serious about getting an answer. So what could He have meant?

The prayer and perhaps fasting in which Jesus engaged were His lifestyle. He was, if I may put it this way, on praying ground. We sometimes feel the need of a schedule or a formal action or object to center our attention, but Jesus was perfectly focused. He lived and breathed the Father's will. Can we learn to do this?

Yes, probably, if we don't read thousands of books instead of actually doing it.

MaryMartha
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Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com