Thank you. This is my first, last, and most essential response to the comments and conversation over the last week in response to my question and post about prayer. One reader emailed to ask who my mentors in prayer have been. I answer that it was first and foremost my parents, but as I thought about it later I also realized very recently it has also been all of you, as I have learned so much about prayer over the last week. Thank you. To honor those comments and respond out of a sense of gratitude to the conversation as it has taken shape, I thought I’d share a few of the things that I’ve learned and have been thinking about in the last...

A weekend ago I was in Colorado and during worship we prayed for the folks on the East Coast as they prepared for Hurricane Sandy. This past weekend I was at home in Minnesota and on Sunday we prayed for those same folks, now on the other side of the Hurricane, and for all those who were working to help them cope with the devastation. A little later in the prayers we also offered our hopes and concerns for those members of our congregation who had left the day before for Ethiopia where they would be partnering with local churches to build wells. Tonight and tomorrow I am in Pennsylvania with a group of pastors on retreat, and we will pray...

I think it’s easy for a lot of folks to get intimidated by prayer. We come to it thinking that there’s a certain way to pray, a right way to pray (and therefore wrong ways to pray as well). Do you know what I mean? Certain phrases and ways of speaking that make a good prayer. If you’re from a more formal religious background, that probably means a certain number of “thees” and “thous,” as in, “Oh Lord, we beseech thee that that thou wouldst grant thy servant…” and so forth. If you’re from a more informal tradition, on the other hand, then the word “just” pops up with some regularity: “We just pray to you, Lord,...

Regarding prayer, I’ve said before that while I don’t understand prayer, I still do it. And I think that’s true of various elements of the faith, full understanding isn’t a requirement for participation. Whether it’s prayer, or the Lord’s Supper, or forgiveness, we are called to participate even as we still seek to understand better. I think these two things are connected and rest near the heart of the life of faith, in fact. First, that there is an element of irreducible mystery to our faith that doesn’t require full understanding to be embraced and, second, that we are still beckoned always to understand more fully. Embracing...