A Guidebook to Prayer by Morse MaryKate;Kang Joshua Choonmin;

Author:Morse, MaryKate;Kang, Joshua Choonmin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2013-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Relinquishment Prayer

Jesus trusted himself to God. He trusted God’s plan to redeem the world, its inhabitants and creatures because of God’s great love. Suffering is everywhere because of evil and a broken world. No one escapes it. We can follow in Jesus’ steps when we enter into our own cup of pain. We do this in prayer in an intimate relationship with God. In all honesty and with exposure of the deepest fears and traumas living in us whether from the evil of others or our own sin, we come to God. We continue in prayer until we experience release.

At the end of Jesus’ prayer he willingly began his journey to the cross. This acceptance and this kind of love are a great mystery, and not one that is easily understood with theological insights or well-phrased answers. We see Jesus’ journey, but when it is our own, it becomes terrifyingly personal. The mystery is that only in prayer, persistence in prayer, and raw, naked honesty can we experience the same victory of the open tomb, the end journey of suffering.

We often limit prayer to our requests and concerns. Jesus brought to God times of extreme distress and confusion. Prayer is a place where the most difficult personal issues of suffering, betrayal and the world’s evil are brought to God. In the Garden Jesus’ prayer was not answered but his assertion of trust in God was declared. In prayer we face the world’s evil and accept the power of grace to overcome. The brilliance of grace is its capacity to convert evil to something holy and redemptive.

When Margaret Duggan’s twenty-three-year-old niece died of cancer, she wrote telling me of her struggles with this horrific pain and loss:

Just a couple of days before Jenny’s funeral, I sat in the car in the driveway at home—I’d been so angry at God, threatening and scornful of Jesus’ physical suffering compared with what Jenny went through. I spent days “letting rip” and then this moment in the car, I thought, “There is no way out of this, there is only a way through it. I can either go through this with God—the God who I am so angry with right now—or I can go through it alone. Whichever way, I will have to go through this.” In that moment in the car, I let go; I let go of blaming God for how Jenny died, let go of blaming him for not answering so many prayers, let go of his having to “work this together for good” for my family in order for Jenny’s death to have any dignity or purpose—basically I let go of God needing to be anything other than what I’ve come to know him to be over these many years, my Friend and my Father of the good times and the bad. Over the course of those few moments, with my head on the steering wheel, I let go. No big sparks or whooshes of joy, but a sense of a

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