Purse praying

You know those times when your purse gets too full and you can't find what you want? You fish and dive, but it your search comes up empty handed, or worse yet, with junk that you didn't want to remember.

So you take the whole purse and dump it out on the counter. For me, the exercise means straightening out the pieces, tossing the wrappers and odd grocery lists and pieces of paper, sorting out receipts and filing them away neatly in a drawer, tossing more trash, finding things I'd forgotten I had. The end result is satisfying, and I'm ready to live again.

Genuine, gut-wrenching prayer is rather like dumping your purse on the kitchen counter. Preachers offer a nice acronym that prayer should be ACTS -- Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, but as I read David's psalms of prayer, it seems like he starts at the other end.

He dumps. No other way to describe it. He dumps all he's feeling out on God and begins to sort through it, piece by piece. Some things get tossed as worthless. Other ideas are more important and get filed away for future reference. The good stuff gets put back in place.

By that time, he's moved through supplication -- aka the big dump or that technical word "imprecatory"-- and reached some thanksgiving. Often along the way he confesses his own wrongs and lays them out on the table too. Finally, he moves to adoration as he reflects that God, and only God, is above all and can do all.

I'm quite certain David didn't have a purse. He traveled light. But the purse of his heart and mind got overloaded and he liked to dump. The good news is that God seems not the least disturbed by his dumping and their relationship is the stronger because David felt free to throw it all on the counter.