A congregation of the United Church of Canada
Plug and Pray
“It was entirely my own fault.”
I had a horrible guitar session the other day. It was entirely my own fault. I was lazy. I knew I had some issues with too many little power adapters so I bought an isolated power supply that gives clean power to multiple devices. But it’s a bit fussy to set up so I hadn’t got to it yet. I also reconfigured some of my setup and added in two devices, one I knew well, and another I had recently acquired but had never turned on. What I wanted to do was to just ‘plug and play’ – flip the switch on the power, turn up the amplifier, and play. What I got was a boatload of frustration.
First, I had to connect a daisy chain (sharing a plug) to power the new pedals. Well, that made one of the other pedals be under-powered and it would randomly turn on and off while I was playing. Then the new device didn’t sound like I expected, so I’m bending over twirling knobs. Then something I thought I’d fixed previously caused a different problem. Well, 15 minutes later the air was a decidedly deep shade of blue, and I shut everything off and stormed out of my music room. Disaster!
Like I said, it was entirely my own fault. I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t want to be bothered making it right, so I pressed on anyway, desperately trying to MacGyver things as I went rather than doing it right in the first place. A couple of days later, when I’d cooled down, I went back, set up the new power supply, reset a couple of things, and now it all works perfectly. It probably took a half hour. Obviously, I should have put in the groundwork and saved myself all that exasperation.
This morning I went for a run on my treadmill. ‘Plug and play’ right? I mean, you just run. What could be easier? But before I could actually run I had to do several things. Perhaps most importantly, I had to go to bed at a reasonable hour so I could wake up refreshed. I had to get out of bed and propel myself toward the activity. I had to change my clothes to put on my running gear. I had to stretch! I had to fill up my water bottle, and set up my tablet and headphones, and then, finally, I was ready to run. I started preparing for my run several hours before I ran. I didn’t put nearly that preparation effort into my guitar session that went so poorly. And it showed.
Sometimes I want my prayer life to be ‘plug and play’ too – or maybe ‘plug and pray’! I want to just sit down and immediately get the satisfaction of spending intentional time in the presence of the Holy. I can’t be bothered with taking the time to prepare myself. And it shows. But when I do take my time, prepare myself, create a quiet space, eliminate all my distractions, take the time to breathe deeply (kinda like stretching!), my chances of not being frustrated go way up!
I barged into my guitar session, unprepared, and crashed and burned. Had I barged into my running session like that I would’ve probably end up injured! Why would I think my prayer sessions would be any different? Jesus taught, “If you are going to worship/pray and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, set your worship/prayer aside. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and worship/pray to God.” (Matthew 5:23-24 paraphrased).
If I want to practice Presence, I have to be fully present. I have to prepare. I have to attend to the little things. Then, and only then, can I ‘plug and pray’. Otherwise, I might pull a spiritual muscle! Ouch!