An Evening With Philip Yancey and Jim Carrey  

Posted by Devin Parker

We have a series of seminars up here that a Minnetonka church sponsors, called the "Faith and Life" series. Each seminar focuses on a different aspect of life and how the Christian faith is intertwined with it. We were introduced to this series when my friend Sherwin Schwartzrock was invited to do a presentation on Christian comic books (he also designed the seminar series' logo).

Last night, Marilyn and I attended another seminar in this series, this one being on the topic of prayer. It was hosted by Philip Yancey (author of Disappointment With God amongst other titles), and it was named after his most recent book, "Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?" It was a topic I've been wanting to hear some talk about, since prayer is one of those areas of my life that I neglect most often and most easily. It's pretty much the most significant part of following Jesus, as it's really about maintaining a relationship with God. Jesus did it constantly; the apostles and early Church did it continually. I do it very rarely, and then only when spurred on by others in a group (such as at church) and with a great sense of guilt. I feel worse about it whenever someone asks me (directly or indirectly, like in a group e-mail) to pray for them: sometimes I'll shoot off a quick prayer about it, but then that's the last time I'll think about it. I've often been reminded by theologians and authors and pastors that prayer is one of the most important and powerful things a Christian can do, but despite its simplicity - all it is is talking to God! - it's the last thing I think of to do, and seems to be the most difficult thing to motivate myself to do.

The presentation that Philip gave was great. To get us into the mood of things, he showed us a clip from the movie "Bruce Almighty," where Bruce [Jim Carrey] finds himself on Mount Everest with God after his first sensation of hearing people's prayers. He told us a number of analogies and experiences that he had had with prayer in his own life and what he'd seen in others' lives. He also briefly tackled his own questions about prayer: Is it worthwhile? Does it accomplish anything? If God already knows what we need, why do we need to pray?

He addressed a number of complaints he'd encountered, too: for example, a female friend of his, who had been molested by her father when she was younger, said that she hated prayer, because whenever prayer was initiated in church, it would begin with addressing "Our Heavenly Father." She had no positive images of what a father might be, and couldn't reconcile the concept of a loving and wise Father God without thinking of someone like her earthly father. The woman to whom she was giving this complaint said, "Well, don't you think it's about time that you fired that image of God?" It was a pretty simple answer, but I know that, for me (and apparently for a lot of other people), I get a false image of what God is like in my head (I get the "dour policeman" that Philip described) and I allow that image to keep me from talking to the Real Actual Living God that exists outside of and independently of my head and my perceptions.

One of the more interesting and powerful things he mentioned was Jesus's words about praying for one's enemies and blessing those who persecute you, which was a concept he said he could find in no other religion. Philip said that, growing up, he knew who his Enemies were: the Soviets. He knew that they had their finger on the button and missiles in Cuba and could wipe them all out and they were enemies of freedom and so on. It never occurred to him to pray for these people. Many years later, after the Berlin Wall fell, he and a number of others were invited by Gorbachev to visit Russia. At one point, they were brought into the offices of the KGB. There, they met with a Colonel who stood stiffly at attention and said, "You have heard of perestroika, but I need to speak to you about repentance." He said that they knew they were guilty of many things for which they needed to repent, and they wanted to make sure that Yancey and his fellow journalists heard him say so. Apparently, this colonel went on to become a general, and one of his actions as such was to pass out New Testaments to all of his troops.

Philip's suggestion, then, was this: what if we of the Church were each to "adopt" a member of al Qaeda for prayer? There's no question who our Enemy is these days - if the KGB could eventually come to repentance before Jesus Christ, couldn't Wahhabist terrorists also be brought to Christ? Certainly it is within the power of God to change people's hearts, to convict them of the truth of things...

Well, I wish all of you could have been there; it was great, and I'm doing a poor job of repeating what he said. Anyway, he answered questions from the audience as well, including one of mine. I said that through my life I'd heard a lot of restrictions put on prayer: being told that if you have unconfessed sin in your heart, that God wouldn't hear your prayer; hearing a theologian, when told about a guy who always said his prayers behind the wheel of his car, responded disparagingly, "Was he still driving at the time?" On the other hand, I've heard some, shall we say, eccentric methods of prayer and interaction with God (such as the Episcopalian rector quoted in the Star-Tribune the other day, who said she didn't "pray in words so much as in images and colors") that strike me as missing the point of prayer. I asked him for his thoughts regarding the "how-to" of prayer. Summarizing, he said that if you're doing it at all, you're probably doing it right.

For the time being, at least, I think that's a good enough answer for me.

The night still being relatively young, Marilyn and I decided to go rent "Bruce Almighty." The clip we watched seemed pretty funny, so we thought we'd take a chance, and indeed, it was a far better movie than I had expected it to be. It had some very well-composed lines about prayer, and good scenes all around. Sort of a reversed version of the book of Job.

I also have to confess that I rather like the idea of God looking and sounding like Morgan Freeman, though ultimately I have to recognize that it's just another one of those images only. Fortunately, God is far greater - I mean, He made Morgan Freeman.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at Sunday, October 15, 2006 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

6 comments

is anyone there? Devin has left me abandoned at the bookstore and won't answer the phone....help

so much for our anniversary...

6:51 PM
Anonymous  

I mentioned it to Liann, who was also duly impressed--how amazing is it that you got to talk to Philip Yancey? That's SO cool!

And very good question, by the way.

Hope you and Marilyn eventually found each other. Happy anniversary :)

10:21 PM

Yes we eventually reconnected thanks to many kind people. It was another reminder that we need to get Devin a cell phone.

Did Devin mention we were an hour early to the seminar? Yes, and Devin picked the time we should leave to go.

It was a miracle I think.

12:53 PM
Anonymous  

Hey Devin,
I know that you've been reading my blog, so i know that you won't be surprised at this comment. but i couldn't help thinking this when i read this post about
prayer, talking to God, etc. hmmmm. it's very interesting. you had just posted a comment on my blog post called 'redefining everything' where i was thinking out loud about God actually 'talking' to me. yours seems to be the same kind of thing in reverse. Michael left a great comment on that post as well, and it came a little after yours, so it might be worth the read to understand where i am going with this. but, basically Michael's point was that, even though it's true that God does/has actually spoken to people before, you can basically count all of those people on one hand. so it would seem logical to conclude that it's an EXTREMELY rare thing for God to actually talk to people. So, i guess that is what led me to ask the question: if God's only speaking to a very select few, why are all of us (the masses, the 'unselected' few) feeling guilty when we don't talk to God as much as we think we 'should'? if i were you, i wouldn't beat myself up too much.

1:27 AM

Well, I think there's a difference here. It's not that God isn't speaking to us at all, just perhaps not in a vocal, flash-of-light, burning bush kind of way. He still speaks to us through His Word, for example. And, as Beth pointed out, it seems to be the case that God reserves those pillar-of-fire moments for those people from whom He's going to ask a significant amount. I don't expect to be arrested or tortured for following Jesus, so I don't know that I necessarily need for God to send an angel with a message for me. What do I need to know that He hasn't already said, that I can't already look up in the Bible, if I'll only take the time to look? My lament/self-criticism is that I haven't been doing even that, and so I ask myself how deep does my commitment to Christ really go?

I don't have any illusions that my prayers are for God's benefit. While I suspect that, being a loving Father, He enjoys hearing from me, and as God and King, my prayer is a way of paying honor to Him, I know that engaging regularly in prayer (from those times in the past that I have done so) makes me a better person. It keeps my mind on Godly things, makes me more aware of opportunities in my daily life when I can speak to others about God, and it makes me more likely to resist the temptation to sin.

12:31 PM
Anonymous  

i can't BELIEVE you got to go to this... I am so coveting right now, DEVIN PARKER! Glad you liked Bruce Almighty... I was pleasantly suprised myself! say hi to Marilyn!

7:57 PM

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