Prayer life: “face time” with God
LeRoy Lawson and Patricia Raybon offer similar testimonies: prayer is not meant to stay a ritual, but to become “face time” with God. Raybon’s journey reframed prayer as listening and enjoying God’s presence, even amid family pain and unanswered circumstances. The article points to time with God as the pathway to a deeper, steadier relationship.
- Prayer can move from ceremony to personal relationship with God.
- Listening and enjoying God’s presence can reshape a strained prayer life.
- Time with God builds an equilibrium that goes beyond a list of requests.
By Mark A. Taylor
Seeking God’s presence
LeRoy Lawson and Patricia Raybon have most likely never met, but their testimonies are remarkably similar. Lawson challenges us to seek the presence of God (page 4). He reminds us that prayer need not remain a ritual or a ceremony, but the crucial step to creating a relationship with the One who made us and loves us.
This relationship is what Raybon is seeking too. Interviewed in the December 2005 Christianity Today, the author of I Told the Mountain to Move (Tyndale, 2005), admitted that her household life didn’t look like that of a “good Christian” after one daughter embraced Islam and another became pregnant out of wedlock.
Although her children had grown up involved in church activities, Raybon believes that wasn’t enough. “I wasn’t introducing my children to Jesus,” she said. “Once you know him, you don’t walk away from him. What I introduced them to was institutional church, to organized activities under the roof of a church.”
Learning to listen in prayer
When the mountains in her life wouldn’t move, she began to look again at her prayer life. “I decided to step back from the mountains and start on this journey to learn how to pray,” she said. In the process, she says she “moved closer to God,” the most important thing that could happen in her life.
I think she’d like Lawson’s talk of “face time” with God, because she’s discovered that “prayer is not about talking as much as listening. It is about enjoying God’s presence.”
Her quest took her to some authors she had never read before. She calls them “classic prayer people,” writers like Brother Lawrence, Richard Foster, Oswald Chambers, and Andrew Murray. “I was fascinated that these authors talked about stepping into the presence of God and resting there,” she said, “just . . . enjoying refreshment in the presence of God.”
She believes the message of her book is for people who struggle with faith in the midst of personal problems. She challenges her readers to keep praying, regardless of the circumstances, and says the Christian can have a “remarkable and personal relationship with our heavenly Father” no matter what else is going on in our lives.
Like all relationships, our connection with God is a factor of time. Our closest friends, our dearest relatives, are those with whom we’ve spent many hours.
This is Raybon’s experience, mirrored in the testimony of our writers this week. This kind of prayer brings satisfaction far beyond a list of requests received from God. What we gain amid the chaos of contemporary life is an equilibrium that comes from knowing his heart.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
