Day 31: 31 Days of Prayer

Day 31: 31 Days of Prayer

Verse:

Read Habakkuk 3.

Reflection:

We have reached the final day of our 31-day journey. If you are like me, your heart has only just begun to shift and change from within. Do not let these 31 days simply pass by! Let this be an opportunity for your prayer life to keep growing, beyond this article. If this article has helped you, consider sharing it with your friends. Today, we read something extraordinary, an extraordinary prayer to God from Habakkuk. The famous metaphors written there are characteristic of prayers of praise in the Old Testament and elsewhere. Words cannot clearly describe the truth of God. And illustrations or metaphorical pictures portray something different. Sometimes they are more accurate, giving a picture of who God is by comparison with us and His creation, but there is still so much to explore and learn about our Father in Heaven. There is no language that can explain the greatness of God. “Using words to talk about words is like using a pencil to draw that pencil. Impossible, confusing, frustrating ... but there are ways to understand it.” - Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind “Emotion, in my experience, is not covered by a single word. I do not believe in ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘regret.’ Perhaps the best proof is language as a simplified description of feeling. I often have complex mixed emotions, like the construction of German train cars, saying, ‘happiness that brings disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with a fantasy.’ I want to show how ‘the familiarity of living beings carried by elderly family members’ is connected to ‘hatred of mirrors beginning in middle age.’ I want to use words for ‘sorrow inspired by the failure of a restaurant’ just as for ‘the delight of getting a room with a minibar.’ I have never found the right words to describe my life, and now that I enter my story, I need them more than ever.” - Jeffrey Eugenides,  Middlesex “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out simple rhythms for dancing bears, while we long to make music that would melt the stars.” - Gustave Flaubert,  Madame Bovary “Words are the inevitable failure to represent what cannot be contained, written, imagined, drawn, or perceived. Words can only imagine things that can be imagined, can only describe what has already been conceived, can only illustrate what has been seen up to this point. From what starting point should description itself be explained? How can creativity be created? What does it mean to illuminate illumination? There is an existence beyond understanding; it is there where God is, creating, and resting." - Daniel Berk, Lifestyle Evangelism Our prayers should be the full effort of our mind, body, and strength to understand God and to praise Him with all our thoughts. Use whatever words you have to praise Him, and learn more words to use. Learn to go beyond words by using your unspoken thoughts, your actions, and your whole being to glorify Him in all things. As written in the book of Habakkuk above, there are many things about God that cannot be explained with words. When we try to express Him in all His greatness, we stop using our reason. Read Ezekiel 1 and see how a Son of Man. Words fail to describe the God we worship. Yet, as you see in Habakkuk, there is always a way for us to go higher and even beyond, to remind us how much greater God is than we are, and how much more powerful He is than everything in the world. He is all those things and far more. He is. His name is I AM.

Challenge:

Write a psalm or a short poem of your own. Use your imagination to reach toward God and all His greatness. Be creative. Use parables. Use emotion. Understand that nothing you say or write can come close to who God is, but try anyway.

Translated from the article “31 Days of Prayer: Day 31” by Daniel Berk