I volunteered to facilitate a session with our little emerging community this weekend, exploring further, our journey of prayer.

In my own personal journey, I’m learning a new response: to be comfortable in the discomfort of unanswered prayer and difficult spaces. So in keeping with our personal journeys being exposed and displayed in our community journeys, I wanted to follow this theme.

I had an ‘end in mind’, in the words of the famous Steven Covey, I wanted the group to paint or draw an image that gave them comfort in their space of unanswered prayer, but we never quite got there. We painted, but not from the space I had intended.

So I had to make a new response in this space of leadership and facilitation, be comfortable in the discomfort of the process not being what I had planned and expected!

W Tozer threw the first spanner. In his book, Man: the dwelling place of God, he says that if our prayers aren’t being answered, we have to check whether:

1. They are in the will of God – that our prayers fall within the broad will of God for all people

2. We are living lives pleasing to God – he hears and only answers the prayers of those who walk in his ways

This set the cat among the proverbial pigeons – we all thought He heard all our prayers, those that were and weren’t within His will and irrespective of our lives and purity before Him.

I was trying to nudge the group past this, I didn’t want to get stuck in the theology, debate and discussion around this. I wanted to move us on to the euphoria of being okay and at peace with our unanswered prayers, it’s much more comfortable!

I asked everyone to think of an area of unanswered prayer: – what is God inviting you to in this space? What is He asking you to consider? What is He exposing in you?

Phillip Yancey’s book on Prayer quoted John Baillie’s thoughts on prayer:

- Let me use disappointment as material for patience

- Let me use trouble as material for perseverance

- Let me use trouble as material for courage

- Let me use reproach as material for long suffering

- Let me use praise as material for humility

- Let me use pleasures as material for temperance

- Let me use pain as material for endurance

This resonnated with our group, and I guess as facilitator, was glad to get to this point as I had wanted us to journey to the place of being comfortable in discomfort. We live in a world where are our slogans are ‘fast’, ‘produce’, ‘destination’, ‘results’ and any hint at contemplation, journey, being is possibly our, or should I say my greatest challenges.

John Baillie’s suggestion of us using success and failure as material for growth are in keeping with Ecl- a time to live and a time to die etc.

I think it’s a journey we’ve just begun – none of us wanted to be comfortable in our discomfort, and I think it takes time, nurturing and discomfort to realise that we can consider just being. So I hope our little community will pursue this ‘discomfort’ further.

On Sunday the 4th of May we met at Nick and Anne’s house for a change. In contrast to the usual coffee, muffins and boisterous chats, singing or drumming before the start of the session we picked up candles to light at the altar and sat in quiet contemplation on the carpet.

Andrew started with a quote from a book “Jesus is not a typical superhero … defeated, executed and abandoned … (his) message is radical peace and non-violence” and a reading from Mark 15. Then Angela led us through a meditation session around the walk to Golgotha with Jesus. We each picked to role play in our own imaginations. We chose one of: Women with Mary, Disciples, Simon of Cyrene or Roman Soldiers. Each of these roles had a reading or two from the Bible.
We walked with Jesus to the hill of Golgotha while Angela asked us to examine where we were from, how long we had known Jesus, his miracles and his teachings, what we felt as we saw him walk up the hill, how it affected us to see him nailed to his cross, mocked, jeered at, fed vinegar, die …

We each shared our experience and talked about our thoughts on Jesus’ life and death along with a story about the followers that left and formed a hidden community in honour of Jesus’ life. From there we each found a physical gesture or routine to express a thought, idea, feeling or word and danced them in a group movement exercise. We rounded off with a Taize song “Jesus remember me”.