Ramblings

I finally have a saxophone! It is a rented one but it's still great to finally have one. Liz gave me a quick lesson after we got back from the shop and I've been playing round with it since. I'll be sorting out lessons with a tutor within the next few days. I'm really looking forward to being able to play properly rather than just mucking round. Should be good.

Well, the past few weeks have been a time of processing. Processing what? I've been thinking a lot about prayer. Melissa and I have been talking a bit about this subject and she passed me a book to read bout it a while back and it's these questions about the book that we've been talking about at our meetings.

Some of the stuff that I questioned after reading the book, No Easy Road by Dick Eastman, were things like: What is real prayer? What if what you are praying for isn't what God wants for you? Why is there so much grey in Christianity?. Prayer is an area I never really explored much of before and I pretty much thought it was a fairly straight forward thing. Melissa passed me this book to read and told me that I have to note down at least one thing that was challenging, helpful and question. This was a good exercise coz it meant that I have to actually read and not just skim through stuff I didn't understand. I ended up with a LOAD of questions (Melissa will be nodding furiously) and it's been good talking them through.

So what is prayer? I use to think that prayer was when you knelt by your bedside at nite before heading off to sleep and asking & thanking God for stuff. And you pray at church too. But Melissa helped clear that misconception at our last meeting. She explained that prayer is essentially communication with God, beit in the traditional sense of prayer or through worship (by singing, drawing, playing an instrument etc etc) or even if it might just be a thought that popped into your head. And so this lead to answering the question, What is real prayer? Well, we came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as real prayer. A prayer is a prayer- a way of communication with God. There is however, inauthentic and authentic prayer.

It's been an interesting past few weeks trying to get my head around what prayer really is. It's hard to change a mind set of so many years. But this meaning and image of prayer is a much more pleasant and comforting one. One that makes a whole lot more sense.

Another thing that has struck me recently was that, I've found it rather frustrating (at times) that the more we want to find out about things it just seems to get more and more complicated. And the more I seem to want answers, the less there is to give! Questions just keep leading to more questions. Sigh...

I hope this post makes sense. I'm not even sure myself if it does but it's just some stuff that's been running round my head that I thought I'd blog about...