I’m Free. What Now?

Phil’s Prayer Chair

This week I begin a new chapter. I’m downright exhilarated. I’ve found freedom, not temporarily free, but permanently, to the end of my life, and beyond. Have you ever felt that way? Life sometimes comes to a pivotal moment. You get to begin again.

As some of you know, over a year ago, I took on a big task. Alongside a marvelous group of younger folks, whom I grew to love, our task was ultimately to nominate a new senior pastor for our church. Not an easy task. After looking at more than a hundred possibilities, conducting a huge number of interviews, listening to tons and tons of sermons, and praying a lot, we found just the right person in our very midst, our own Pastor Chris Woodard. I am hugely excited to see what the future holds under Pastor Woodard’s preaching and leadership.

As it all wrapped up, though, I was worn out. And then it hit. I began to realize the task is really over. I am free. That’s when I began to get a little giddy.

What now, I began to ask? Suddenly a huge burden had been lifted. Oh sure, there are still lots of tasks seeking my attention. Some guy smashed off our taillight in a parking lot. I’ve got to get that fixed. We’re trying to change doctors. So many things yet to do, but the overall feeling is this exhilarating freedom to choose what I will do next.

When you get this opportunity, you begin to ask what matters. This gets serious, not just broken taillights, but bigger things. How will I spend my time? How will I arrange life’s activities? Does my vision of life need reordering? The great Saint Augustine memorably argues that when we finally decide to follow Jesus we must reorder our loves. And so I am asking, at this moment in my life, with this new-found freedom, what do I really love?

Of course we must begin with love for others. I told a gathering of some of our family last week in Santa Barbara that I love their mom and grandmom more than I have ever loved her in all of our sixty-two years of marriage. I want to reorder my life around her more faithfully, more generously, more graciously. Something similar goes for our children and grandchildren too. And to our friends, so many of whom are suffering in these days.

But there are those moments of what the Christian tradition calls solitude. It’s huge. What might I do differently, now that I am free, as I sit in my prayer chair early in the morning, alone, in silence? Well, I am eager to share, I have re-devoted myself to prayer, deeper prayer, what the ancients often call real prayer.

As is my bent in life, I pulled all the books from my shelves on prayer. There was a huge number, writings all the way from prayer in the Bible, through the fourth century desert fathers, through the monastic periods from the sixth century to the nineteenth century and beyond, from Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants, from poets, and prophets, from the Celtic way of prayer, and on and on. Anne Lamont’s book title gives me something to think about: Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.

 But it is not just reading I’m doing. I am praying. In new ways, deeper, more fresh, every morning in my prayer chair, often for an hour. Sharon and I have started a new practice of praying each night together, out loud, before sleeping. With all this new praying I am seeking to come closer to Jesus. I am asking for guidance and help and healing, of course, but I am also trying to listen better to what God is saying to me.

This may sound like the reflections of a man growing older. Perhaps this may seem like a luxury to my younger friends who are hard at work in their vocations. But there is something essential here, especially in our tumultuous times of uncertainty, hatred, anxiety, fear, violence, and all the rest. I have a new moment of freedom to think about reordering my life around peace, comfort, clarity, grace, new purpose, love, humility—all those things promised for those who invite God into our little spaces each morning. It’s working, folks! I think this reordering brings me closer to what really matters. That’s when God wants to get involved. And, indeed, it’s making me downright giddy.