Dear Daughters,

What is the most difficult thing in the world for you to do? 

Be patient with your kids?  Always speak kindly to your husband?  Exercise?  Give generously? Eat healthy?  Keep focused and on task?  Stay away from social media?

Last week I read Patricia Raybon’s I Told the Mountain to Move.  The hardest thing in the world for her was praying.  She only learned to pray, really pray, after she turned 50 years old.  Growing up in the colored Christian Methodist Episcopal church all her life, she knew how to shout Hallelujah and Thank you Jesus during the service.  She knew how to smile pretty and shriek and holler when the others did.  She loved all the stories about Jonah and the whale, Daniel in the lion’s den, Elijah and the raven, Jesus feeding the 5,000, but she figured God lived in church and in the Bible and when you got home you were on your own. 

Patricia was a journalism professor at the University of Colorado for years; she is smart, she is witty, but she confesses that she didn’t know how to love because she didn’t know how to pray.  But then some hard, serious stuff happened in her life and it became a necessity to pray.  It is then she learned that praying is simply talking with God, having a running conversation with Him throughout the day.  You just lean back in the moment and talk.  As Ms. Raybon says:

Prayer is like that.

If you know what you are doing, it is like that.

If you know the One you are talking to, it is like that.

If your motives are right, it is like that.

Two good friends, just talking.

Patricia writes candidly about her family.  Her mama, who she didn’t understand and often was misunderstood herself – mothers and daughters are sometimes like that.  Her husband, from whom she had grown apart, become annoyed with and often made snarky comments to – I can identify with that.  Her two daughters who had grown up, moved away and lived unlike their mother had taught them – yeah, it happens. 

There are times she even uses the word hate when it comes to relating to some people in her life and some races who had oppressed her own.

Duty – that’s how Patricia names it – is what she had given to both her immediate and extended family.  She thought it was love, but as she later realized it was barely affection, and to be honest, simply duty.  But when her husband faced a life-threatening surgery – a fistula on his spinal cord causing paralysis – she threw herself into the lap of God.  Her eyes were opened to the self-sufficient life she had been living, and she came boldly to her Lord, asking and opening herself up to his loving and eternal readiness to listen. 




We are allowed to read passages from her prayer journal, complete with hard honest questions, grave accusations and yet immense gratitude. Her entries remind me of King David’s writing in the Psalms – intense emotional laments, strong accusations and yet assurance that God cares, has been faithful in the past and will continue to be in the future. 

Was praying easy for her?  No, it was some of the hardest work she had ever done in her life, but she read, she studied – eager to learn from the pray-ers who have gone before us and left their writings for us to learn.  Sometimes her prayers were wordless groans, because words weren’t enough, they couldn’t express her soul’s longing and anguish.

Patricia explains that in spite of her own travail in praying for her husband who spent weeks in the hospital and months in rehab, she learned to love.  She reached out to others in the crowded waiting rooms, those who were suffering – the mother whose son had swallowed Drano as a way out from his drug addiction, the Fat Family who were loud, obnoxious and rude.  She loved them – I should say God gave her the heart and ability to love them.  On her own she wanted to wallow in her own weariness and despair, but when she reached out to others who were hurting like she was, she found out she could love people, even people who annoyed her.

Amazingly this love she learned through prayer became a way of life for her.  She learned to love her mama, her husband, and many others who she had previously only tolerated.  Her relationships became filled with grace, joy and beauty.  It took time, years actually, yet she has persevered and continues to pray boldly, always keeping her eyes focused on Jesus and the amazing way He has loved her.

We all have To-do lists, things we have to get done – some today, some tomorrow, some whenever. But Patricia started a new list and named it Give-to-God list. How wise and utterly freeing. Now if I can just remember, remember, remember to give my people, and all the details of my life to God. They are not mine to worry about, fret about, or even waste mental real estate thinking about.

So, I have started my Give-to-God list and it will continue to grow…

Many books I have previously read on prayer tend to deal with praying to get stuff and change people (including yourself of course) but Patricia plainly insists,

We don’t pray to get, we pray to love.

Thank you, Patricia.  Because of you I am continually learning to pray, and it is slowly changing me. 

God, help us all to be honest in our helplessness and hopeful in your Love.

Love, Mom