Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. [Philippians 4:6-7 (MSG)]
The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. [C.S. Lewis]
The above words are from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For Lewis, those first moments of wakefulness were the most important ones of the day because they set one’s frame of mind. When God is our first thought of the day, we begin the morning with a sense of peace and power – peace because we know the day is in His hands and power because we know that through Him we can get through anything it throws at us. It’s as if an invisible barrier has been set up between us and the desires, troubles, and cares of the world in which we live.
Unfortunately, some days that barrier doesn’t get erected. When that happens, it’s as if the world uses a battering ram to crash into our thoughts and things like anxiety, anger, annoyance, stress, pain, and fear come stampeding through our minds. For the rest of the day, we struggle to find that peace Jesus promised His followers. When Lewis wrote those words about shoving back our thoughts and ceding our minds to God, he added, “We can only do it for moments at first. But, from those moments, the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.”
Some sixteen years after writing those words, Lewis truly knew how difficult it was to shove back the world’s thoughts and let God’s voice come flowing into his mind. Once again, his wife Joy was diagnosed with terminal cancer and a second miraculous recovery did not appear to be in God’s plan. When writing to a friend about Joy’s diagnosis, Lewis said the following: “The dreadful thing, as you know, is the waking each morning—the moment at which it all floats back on one.”
Lewis is not the only one to wrestle with turning his first waking moments over to God. Even without the impending death of a spouse, we struggle to keep the challenges of the coming day from assaulting us and stealing our peace. When life goes awry, dark troubling thoughts can bombard our minds at the crack of dawn. Instead of dedicating our thoughts to God and thanking Him for another day, we think things like, “Oh God, not another day like yesterday; not another day of pain and trouble; not another day of bad news. Please God, no more!”
Surely, Abraham woke to dark thoughts the morning he was to sacrifice his beloved Isaac. David, knowing his infant son would die, must have had dark thoughts every morning during the seven days of his boy’s illness. Perhaps even Jesus, knowing what lay ahead for Him, struggled with dark thoughts when he woke that last Thursday morning.
As Lewis so wisely said, “We are Christians, not Stoics.” Anxiety, worry, and even fear are part of being human and yet they sap our strength and undermine our faith. The first moments of our day, however, can make a tremendous difference in our journey. It’s a darn sight easier to erect a dike before the flood, shore up a wall before it starts to cave, and turn the day over to God before its troubles start barging in. We’ll still have the challenges of the day but we’ll have the power and strength to face them. As Lewis discovered, it’s not easy but it’s worth a try!
Jesus offered fishing advice to the disciples twice after they’d spent a night of fishing with absolutely nothing to show for it and, twice, after doing as He directed, they ended up with a miraculous catch of fish. The first time, their catch was so heavy that their nets began to tear and the two boats hauling it in nearly sunk from the weight! The second time, unable to pull the net into their boat, the men had to get out and drag it into shore!
In Sharon Garlough Brown’s novel, Two Steps Forward, a character choses to pray the Hebrew word hineni during Advent. When another character calls it a beautiful but “costly” prayer, I grew curious about this word. Hineni is composed of two little words, hineh and ani. By itself, hineh is usually translated as “behold” but, when combined with ani (meaning “I”), it usually is translated as “Here I am,” “I’m here,” or “Yes.” However, like shalom, the Hebrew hineni loses the depth of its meaning in translation.
I began my prayer with, “Lord, you’ve got to…” but got no further. “God doesn’t ‘got to’ do anything!” said a still small voice and the Spirit’s point was well taken. By beginning with an impertinent demand like a selfish petulant child in a toy store, I showed chutzpah of the worst kind and began again.
Jesus told two parables about persistence. In the first, a man went to his neighbor’s home at midnight. Waking him, he asked for three loaves of bread because a traveler just arrived and he had no food for his hungry guest. Initially, the neighbor refused to open the door but, after tiring of the man’s persistent knocking, he finally gave him the bread. In the second parable, a widow kept badgering a corrupt judge with her appeals for justice against a man who has harmed her. Finally, worn down by her persistent pleas, the exasperated judge granted her request.
Having quoted from Isaiah when proclaiming the Messiah’s arrival, we know John knew Isaiah’s prophecies. The Messiah would “bind up the brokenhearted [and] proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners,” [61:1] but, after spending more than a year confined to a dark cell, John had neither liberty nor freedom. It’s no wonder he doubted.
