This week, Dennis Allan discusses the way prayer is meant to be done in community and how it's supposed to expand outward. Jesus invites His people to come to God and ask for the things they want, to be vulnerable and honest as they express their wills and desires to Him. But prayer that stays privatized and individualistic misses the expansive and communal nature of prayer, where we bear one another into God's presence as a first act of caring love. We might think praying is a passive activity, yet Jesus saw it as integral to a well-lived, faithful live. And, we might think prayer can replace action, but the reality is that prayer actually informs and drives our actions. We are to be a people who pray with and for one another, and in so doing be people who are shaped and formed into people of selfless love.

This week, Pastor Dennis talks through Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He asked God if there was a way to fulfill His mission without dying on the Cross. It's here that we see Jesus practice a radical form of vulnerability and honesty in praying with God. He sweats and begs, telling His Father what He actually wants. Yet, we're trained to perform, even in our conversations with God. We bring our best selves, our most faithful selves, our edited selves to God instead of our raw, honest, broken, doubting, and disoriented selves to God. Psalm 88 is an example of this kind of prayer, a prayer of disorientation. It's a prayer spoken when we're surrounded by darkness, when we're experiencing despair, when everything seems to be falling apart, and it's a prayer that refuses to resolve well or easily. If God is going to transform us, then we need to stop pretending and we need to start being honest.

This week, Pastor Dennis begins our new series, "Being With God" by focusing on the way prayer is not about getting God to align with our agenda, but instead prayer is about building a deep, intimate, trusting relationship with God. We can make prayer into something where we ask God for what we want and expect Him to give it to us, or we can think that prayer is what draws God's attention to us. But, God is always paying attention to us, He's always attentive and attuned to us, and He's always desiring deeper relationship with us. Drawing on Howard Thurman's writings about prayer in his book Disciplines of the Spirit, and Jesus's words in John 15 about Him being the vine and us being the branches, we can see that we're already connected to Jesus and prayer is about bringing our desires and will into alignment with God's eschatological vision for our lives, as well as our neighbors, neighborhoods, and cities.