Know the God You Pray To

Spirituality Column #67
February 19, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Know the God You Pray To
By Bob Walters

Pope Benedict was recently asked how Christianity is different from other religions.

He responded that in every religion, human beings seek God. Christianity, he said, is a religion in which God also seeks man.

As a Christian, I like the idea that God is looking for me because I am looking for Him. How do I know God is looking for me? Because He sent Jesus Christ to establish an eternal relationship with me, you … all of us (John 3:16).

I accept that my human pursuit of Christ is imperfect, but know that in my faith I have the assurance that God is on the other end of that relationship perfectly trying to find me. The Bible tells me so. So does the Pope.

A friend recently lamented to me that he was indeed trying to find God in prayer, but couldn’t. He cited an author he read who had searched Ashrams in India for prayer, meditation, enlightenment, etc.

When I asked him the name of the God he was seeking, I tacitly (and to my chagrin) went a little overboard it seems in challenging his interpretation of God. “You Christians always sound like that,” he said. “You won’t tolerate the thought that someone else might be right.”

Still, I asked him to name the name of the God he was seeking. If prayer is talking to God, isn’t it a good start, I reasoned, to know with Whom one is trying to talk?

He couldn’t say, but trusted the lady Ashram author as the more appropriate broker of his hoped-for, deeper prayer life with God, the Divine, or whatever. He just couldn’t say What or Who the Divine was.

I wonder sometimes why people make it so hard. Truly and too often, I lament my own inability to convincingly share the following wonderful news:

God is already looking for us, the Holy Spirit is already in us, and Christ has already created a bridge for us to an eternal relationship with God.

If we want that, all we have to do is ask, and then be still. We will know that He is God (Psalm 46:10).

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is pretty sure that prayers are best delivered when properly addressed and not when sent out "General Delivery."