Prayer: God's Transforming Presence

Prayer is both the life of all lives, but also the death of everything that isn't life. I find that a challenge because there are still so many ways I think of something as life that just isn't. I read about this sort of wisdom in some of the older writers:

"…Augustine Baker can be understood when he speaks of the crisis situation into which genuine prayer plunges man and insists that the steady practice of prayer is the greatest mortification of all. He does not mean that prayer itself is the sacrifice. But that persistent prayer brings man into a situation where the presence of the living God will irradiate him and leave him no alternative but rebuild the room, or to break off the contemplation. Jean Grou has said, ‘The holy spirit will either control all of your actions or cease to govern your prayer,' or the matter could be put still more bluntly in Russell Maltby's words, ‘When we go into God's presence, we must surrender.'” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957, p. 44).

If prayer is relationship with God, then living my life as prayer means continuing to linger in God's presence. This will mean an exposure of that in me which is contrary to God, even opposed to God. Either that impulse will win and I will neglect the Presence, or I will bring that impulse into God's loving, healing presence and He will win. And He's a much more gracious Winner!