Shine Through the Shadows

The wonder of prayer and family.

When my wife and daughters sleep in the mornings, I walk around the backyard and into the woods, praying.

For them.

For the day. For their day.

Prayer gets a bad rap these days.

But prayer is a gift given to us.

Imagine a World With No Prayer

Imagine if prayer did not exist—prayer of any kind. What if we could not whisper thoughts to someone or something out there? Imagine the hopeless feeling of aloneness.

So many already feel like we’re careening on a rock in the middle of a nowhere universe. Now imagine that out there, there really is someone or something. And what if that something is the most beautiful, the most incredible of things? What would that mean to you?

I spoke with a woman yesterday about her faith. She’d attended a Catholic church her entire life, and she told me her pastor had told her life was about being a good person.

Then, I told her I was speaking tonight at Duke University. When she asked why, I told her I was reading from my book, The Beauty Chasers, and that I believed life was more about how God created and loved me.

Then, she asked about my writing. I told her how I studied beauty. And she asked me why. I told her I studied beauty because I believed God was beauty itself. She stood amazed at this statement. And she didn’t know quite how to respond.

I told her there were Nobel Prize-winning physicists who were not religious and that several left room for wonder, unanswered questions, and beauty. I told her how Frank Wilzcek—a Nobel Prize winning physicst—believes that the universe embodies beautiful ideas. If that is true, it indicates that an artist is behind the universe's design. This physicist is not a Christian. I don’t know what he believes. But I told this kind woman that a Creator is out there. I told her to imagine what that meant for her—how she was a created marvel. That sentiment brought a smile to her face.

There’s a Creator Out There

When I walk the backyard and woods praying for my daughters and wife, I’m not just throwing up mindless petitions to an uninhabited sky. I’m speaking to Jesus, the Son of Glory. I’m speaking to the One who holds the universe together with the power of his word.

I love that he really is there. And I love what that means for me and to me. I love that I can speak into the quiet moments to a God who is there.

In the shadows of the morning, I cry out to God the Father, asking him to protect my family. I pray for their hearts that God would grow himself inside of them.

I pray that he will grant me wisdom in my relationships with them.

I pray that the Holy Spirit hears my prayer and intercedes for me because I am a frail and wicked man. I remind him of his own words, “There is no one good, no, not even one.” And I raise my hand and confess that I am the “not even one” of all the world, that my life is dependent upon God’s mercy.

And I pray for the mercy and grace to be a Dad and a husband—his vocatio on my life.

I often imagine my spirit and my life mirroring the heart of Edmund from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I am the betrayer. I left the Beaver’s warmth for the witch’s cold.

But I am also the one whom the Great Lion rescues. He frightens me but shows me that he is Good.

As I walk amidst the birdsong, I hear his great Lion Heart beating, his Lion lungs breathing, and I feel like I can conquer the world, for the Lion stands behind me, before all around me.

Prayer is a portal. I transport from my woods to the footsteps of heaven, and I cry out for strength. And he gives it.

Use the Portal and Return to Him

If I’ve learned one thing in my years of following Jesus, failing, following again, and on and on, it’s that he loves when I return, when I rest with him, when I admit my weakness to him, and when I love my family hard.

He loves it when I keep coming to him in prayer and speaking to him. “It is my spirit that speaks to your spirit,” I tell him, using Jane Eyre’s address.

And there we stand: me with my cup of tea, addressing the King of Heaven’s armies spirit to Spirit. And gives me rest.

Cry out to him today, friends. He wants you to return. He wants to give you peace—His Peace, he wants to give you rest, he wants to invite you in to sit with him at table.

“We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.”

—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

Pray for me tonight, friends, as I read from The Beauty Chasers at Duke, and I pray for you all that God gives you his peace, strength, and unending grace.