Red Flags of Prayer Disorder
A soul untried by sorrows is good for nothing.
Theophan the Recluse1
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.
Sun Tzu
There are two perils to be avoided. One is emotional unreality and the other is intellectual preoccupation. There must be truth as well as spirit in all worship, and nowhere is the combination more necessary than in the secret place of prayer. Altar fires are kindled and quickened by truth, but the truth must get to the altar.
Samuel Chadwick2
A colleague recently returned from a summer vacation at his in-laws' farm in central Kansas. In between stints of hoisting bales of hay from baler to flatbed truck, he got a chance to philosophize with his father-in-law.
One of the more profound insights to emerge was on the different outlooks of farm folk and city dwellers. This from a man who both farms and works in a farm-implement factory in town: "The biggest difference I can see is that city people always think that this year has got to be better than last year. If they don't get a raise, acquire something new, or find themselves somehow better off, they think they're failures.
"Farm folks look at things a bit differently. We know there are going to be good years and bad years. We can't control the weather. We can't prevent a bad crop. We can't control sickness. So you learn just to work hard and make up your mind to take what comes."
When it comes to our spiritual lives, most of us are city dwellers. We discourage easily. It doesn't take too many setbacks before we're overwhelmed with our failures, and weeks can slip by before we dig our way out to start again. We'd be better off if we accepted slippage as ...
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