Good words in this meditation by Brother David Vryhof (Society of St. John the Evangelist) about how we can be honest with God in our prayer lives, because God knows us better than we may know ourselves:
"The Triune God sees and knows everything about us, even what we keep hidden from others. When we realize that God sees it all and still loves us with an unwavering love, we can risk being honest in our prayer. God does not want to hear from us lovely platitudes or empty promises or carefully crafted words; in prayer God desires our honesty. Genuine prayer is always truthful and real. We can pray the truth about ourselves because God is trustworthy and faithful. Because of this, we can bring to God the whole of our lives, not just our ‘spiritual selves.’ As we say in our community’s Rule of Life:
The life of prayer calls for the courage to bring into our communion with Christ the fullness of our humanity and the concrete realities of our daily existence, which he redeemed by his incarnation…. We are to bring him our sufferings and poverty, our passion and sexuality, our fears and resistances, our desires and our dreams, our losses and grief. We must spread before him our cares about the world and its people, our friends and families, our enemies and those from whom we are estranged. Our successes and our failures, our gifts and shortcomings are equally the stuff of our prayer…
(The Rule of the Society of St John the Evangelist, chapter 22, page 45)
Brother David’s complete message and an audio recording of it may be found here.
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