Help, Thanks, Wow-- Week 1 (Honesty)

I hope everyone had a great Easter, and had the chance to celebrate with family/friends! Today, we are starting our new study, where we will be looking at the book Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott. If you bought the book (or are planning to) we will cover a chapter a week, with today being the introduction, and concluding with the “Amen” chapter on week 5.

In the first chapter, Lamott discusses her thoughts and definitions of prayer, and summarizes it as reaching out to God (or even just the light, the good, or whatever higher power you claim). She speaks of prayer as private, wherein even if you pray with others, that communication is primarily meant for you and God—He is the one with which you are ultimately trying to communicate.

Lamott also talks about prayer as complete honesty, which is where I want to focus today. One of the amazing things about God is that He can take our honesty. Not only can He take us pouring out our thoughts to Him, no matter how dark, or confused, or selfish they may be—He already knows them. Nothing we tell Him in prayer is going to shock Him, because He already knows how we are feeling, and He sometimes understands those feelings better than we do ourselves. There is absolutely no point in hiding our feelings, or trying to hold something back in prayer, or pretending that we are “fine” with God—He knows. He already knows it ALL.

And, the best thing about the fact that He knows, is that He loves us anyway. God is not going to turn away from us because we are honest with Him. It is in our honesty, in communicating our questions, and our excitements, and our anxieties and hurts, that He is truly able to move. Just as when you want to get advice on something you have to first communicate the problem, with God, when we pour out our hearts, and then move on to LISTEN, we ask Him to start the healing process.

We don’t have to have it all together before we approach God. That’s not His expectation. Honestly, how could we have everything in our crazy lives together without Him? Mark 2:17 reminds us that Jesus did not come for the healthy, but for the sick. What a reassurance! God is here to help us deal with our problems, with our insecurities, and He wants us as we are. Right now. No waiting another day to get this or that together. He wants us to give it to Him now, and begin allowing Him to fix what we can’t fix on our own.

As we pour out our thoughts to God, the good, the bad, and the ugly, we also need to stop to listen. When we are done talking, we have to allow the quiet and the space for Him to talk back. While God can speak in a million different ways, in Scripture, we see Him whispering much more than we see Him shouting and forcing people to listen. If we want God to speak in to our problems, or to give us direction, we must spend time waiting on Him. Just as you couldn’t expect to hear from a friend whom you constantly ignore, the same is true with God. As we begin to incorporate moments of silence or stillness in to our days, we will be much more likely to also begin to hear the heart of God.

It is my prayer for us today that we will have an honest conversation with God—that we will acknowledge to Him the feelings that we have, the concerns that are forefront in our minds, and the joys that we are experiencing. As we come to Him in honesty, may we feel freedom.