Child-like prayer...

This past Sunday, I sat down in church next a mother and her son. The son was roughly 25, but you could tell after a few moments that he had the mental capacity of roughly an 8-10 year old. No filter and very overt in his actions (and attentions). He was the type of pew-neighbor that [if I'm really honest] I often try to avoid:

• Claps too long, even after everyone else has stopped;
• Laughs loudly in awkward places in the service;
• Continually scoots closer to me on the pew;
  
• Hurdles himself back down into the pew with the energy of an 8-year-old boy but the pound-age of a 25-year-old man leading to large pew vibrations;
• Loudly whispers to me throughout the service;
• Sings off-key very enthusiastically.

And there was a very large part of me that wanted to pull the pew-scoot out of there. Not proud of that, but just being honest.

But here's what struck me. The pastor finished the sermon, and began to pray. In the middle of his prayer, he stopped and gave the congregation room to pray silently for those in need of God's healing touch. And from my right side, I heard this 25-year-old kid unabashedly pray:

"Oh God, please heal me."

And I, in my righteous social appropriateness, had to take pause for a moment to consider those few small words.

"Oh God, please heal me."

Can I (do I) pray in that way? Or when the pastor tells us to pray for those who are in need of God's healing touch, do I always exclude myself from that need? See, for all of his social inappropriateness and awkwardness, this guy understood something that I often times don't. He prayed as a man in need of healing, without fancy words or protocol, without shame in his need or conditions to his request. Child-like expectation.

So here's my thought: maybe, just maybe, some of those "social proprieties" need to get chucked from our prayer lives. We pray nice prayers. We pray pretty prayers with good rhetoric and even keel. And we pray for God's healing in others, in the world, assuming that we can take care of our own issues. Or, worse, presuming that we are not ourselves in need.

Wrong.

I think the invitation to us, friends, is remove the filter; to pray with honesty and rawness, not the sanitized prayers we often pray; to actually talk, using real words, to the God who made us and loves us, unabashedly, in certainty of his love for us; to pray with child-like expectation for adult-sized issues; to relinquish control and place ourselves fully in God's hands.

Maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said:

"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3-4)