I wanted to write a blog about prayer based on a recent experience.  Let me describe the scene:

I found myself facing a five hour lay over at the Vancouver airport. My flight was in the evening, meaning I would be in the airport when I would normally do evening prayer. I could have skipped these evening devotions, after all, evening prayer is never required of me. God’s love is not contingent upon my perfect execution of this religious rite. Still, evening prayer is a habit that has proven important to me, so I try to engage in it as much as I can.

I found a quiet corner removed from the traffic of travelers. I sat down, dug out my prayer books, and began my prayers. “O Lord, I call you, come to me quickly; Hear my prayer as I call to you”, I began.

I barely finished this opening prayer when a gentleman on a cellphone burst into the corner. While I sat there trying to pray, he carried on an animated conversation and paced back and forth. No sooner was he finished when a mother and child came to look out the window. They stopped directly in front of me, and watched whatever was happening outside. Each time I turned the page in my prayer book, a new visitor entered the space. My quiet and out of the way corner of prayer was becoming extremely filled.

At first, I was going to write about how prayer is sometimes met with distractions and interruptions. I wanted to posit how the devil tries to keep us from prayer. The more the devil can stop us from praying, the more that a prayer-filled relationship with the Lord can be thwarted. I thought better of this. Frankly, suggesting that a mother and child was some type of spiritual attack against my evening prayer seemed insulting, unloving, and ultimately unbiblical.

I then thought of writing on the importance of perseverance. The blog would describe the need to push through these distractions. But this blog seemed far too self-aggrandizing. It would suggest that I had somehow achieved some heightened spiritual feet by pushing through my frustrations. The blog would end up promoting a vain spirituality where I lauded how spiritual I was becoming. Jesus words about praying in the marketplace to receive earthly rewards echoed in the back of my mind.

As I stopped to reflect on this event, and what the Lord might teach me through this distraction-filled time of evening prayer, I felt God whisper into my soul, “Prayer is a part of life”.

Here’s the point: We don’t live our faith in a spiritual vacuum. Life is noisy; its busy, and its complicated. We live our lives in world filled with competing things all demanding our attention. We play a game but need to answer the phone in the middle of our turn; we make schedules and plans only to find that they need to be augmented to accommodate the immediate or the last-minute. To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when we are busy doing other things.

The same occurs with prayer. Prayer happens as life swirls around us. Have you ever started to pray only to have a knock at the door? Parents will recognize needing to balance a time of prayer with a crying nap-resistant child. It happens more than we might think. Do these events rip us away from divine intimacy? Are they spiritual attacks upon us?

If we think this that prayer can only occur when all is quiet, we inevitably find ourselves viewing every hiccup or distraction as a negation or prayer.  And once prayer is negated by interruption, it’s easily abandoned. We end up reserving prayer for those special times when no one is around, and all is silent.  But as my airport devotions proved, such times can be few and far between.

So, what do we do when life crashes into our prayer-corner? We continue as best we can. We pray. not trying to prove our perseverance, but because prayer is just as much a part of that messy moment as the angry person on the phone. We continue to pray because the busy, interruption-filled corner of life is just as much a part of our spiritual life as the church pew.

Our prayers in that moment might not be the most pristine or exultant. But they will be honest and real, and that’s is the only thing Jesus wants of us.