At least to pray is left, is left.
O Jesus! in the air
I know not which thy chamber is,—
I’m knocking everywhere.
EMILY DICKINSON
How simply and profoundly Emily Dickinson reflects a reality that most all of us feel at one time or another, if not quite regularly. We feel like we are knocking everywhere for God, but never getting through.
However, in the Bible this reality is reversed. In Jesus’ difficult message to the church in Laodicea, it is He who does the knocking, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
Doesn’t that sound appealing…Jesus as our dinner guest? Jesus at our table? Jesus coming in? But the sad reality is that we are often hard pressed to find the door. I remember as a child seeing an illustration of this verse where Jesus is pictured knocking at a door without a door knob. What a simple way to picture, again, the reality that it is we who are called upon to open the door. Jesus is waiting, is willing, is wanting to be with us. However, it is we who must answer the door.
It’s humbling when you think about it—the One through whom all things were made (John 1:3) desires our company. But driven by self-importance and self-gratification, we rush off to our next activity. It is Martha vs. Mary. It is the good vs. the best. It is trading what is most important for life’s clutter. Daniel Taylor, in The Skeptical Believer, describes it this way:
Clutter is the impeding accumulation of stuff— physical stuff and mental stuff and “stuff to do”—that may be of no great value in itself but that distracts us from more important things. A less important thing that blocks us from a more important thing becomes, by default, the most important thing of that moment. If it is the thing we most attend to, it becomes the thing we treat, experientially, as the most important. The great deception of a cluttered life is that it presents itself to us as inevitable. These are things I have to have or have to do—“ I have no choice.” But of course we do. We could choose quite differently. But that would require living a different life, and as much as we complain, we prefer the cluttered life we know to the life we don’t know…. The most likely place for God in a cluttered life is somewhere on a shelf, along with other knickknacks and odd bits. Too valuable to throw away (“might need this someday”) but not so valuable so as to throw away instead many of the other things and make God central.
If Taylor’s insight is correct, and I think it is, then the issue is not too much unanswered “knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s door,” as Bob Dylan put it, but paying too little heed to Christ’s call.
There is nothing new under the sun. As it was with Martha and with the church in Laodicea, so it is with you and I. We fuss and fret about so many things, all the while overlooking that which is best. I write these words as a busy summer is winding down and as a busier fall is just winding up. And the clutter mounts.
But I repeat Taylor’s words, “The great deception of a cluttered life is that it presents itself to us as inevitable.” All too often, I think we accept meager prayer lives as “the cost of doing business” in a busy world or “acceptable losses” in each day’s battles. But as much as I hate to admit it, for the most part, it comes down to choices I make. Each day I decide what will be most important. I pray, as I look to a new school year filled with a lot of good things, that I will discipline myself to prioritize that which is best. Will you join me in this prayer?
Pastor Dan
Want practical help in prioritizing that which is best? Read about Pastor Dan’s Spiritual Formation seminar starting this fall.