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Help Me Overcome My Unbelief

             Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)

“‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’” (Matthew 7:9-13)

 

I relate to these today. Oh, I don’t have a child who is demon possessed. Most of the things I go to God about aren’t that important. Some are important, but I can’t seem to muster up Gethsemane levels of emotion that I seem to equate “effective, fervent prayers” that will accomplish something. My prayers - even when I’m not praying “The Lord’s Prayer” - often sound more like the second passage. You could pray it with comic opera intensity, but more often than not, it sounds to me like a casual conversation mapping out the day’s activities over breakfast. “I’ll take the kids to school. You do the dishes. And don’t forget to put gas in the lawn mower.”

I know that we should be more respectful than my example in our prayers to God, who is God. But the Lord’s Prayer is that pedestrian, that casual, and routine. And practicing faith in or through these quotidian matters is a good place to start to build the sort of faith that can handle the bigger, tougher stuff.

That may be where the father on the foot of the mount of transfiguration was. He had the faith to get them there. He had the faith to turn to Jesus when the disciples failed. But when he “looked down at the test paper on his desk,” the math questions turned into questions about Chinese grammar. You’ve been there. It’s another case where sin is crouching at your door. For those of you who read the Lord of the Rings, this is where Grima Wormtongue slips in with his greasy words. (Can you tell that I’m trying to give you images you can hold on to?) “Panic!” he whispers. “This is no place for failures and cowards like you.”

Like the father, we need to ask for help.

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