Swim 'til you drown; Know that we all fall down.

Prayer sucks.


But only because I'm not good at it, because it's a struggle.


In reality, prayer is "more powerful than any force of nature." And like all disciplines, it takes practice, dedication.


If my hunch is right, it's something like painting: you wander around, prepping canvases and arranging paint tubes and making fussy little charcoal sketches and shifting the lighting and selecting the right background music. You hesitantly mix a color or two, touch brush to canvas, mix another color, steel yourself against walking away, and continue to touch the canvas. And suddenly, it's five hours later and your canvas is bursting with color and your heart is so involved that you don't realize the music went off, the sun went down, and you missed dinner.


When I pray, I pray for this and that, mention all my family members, bring up my singleness, and remind myself of God's sovereignty and grace, then wander into another list of little things. I know that if I were to paint every day for hours at a time, not only would it get easier to pick up the brush and touch it to canvas, but my paintings would become more structured, more inviting, more artistic. And I get the feeling that if I could just learn to pray more often, every day for hours at a time even, prayer would be less like a visit to a nursing home patient and more like painting, or making love, or a white water kayaking trip.


I don't know this for sure, but this is what I hear some people saying, and a voice in my heart says, "That is true."

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

I keep finding myself face-to-face with my failings lately.  I know things should change, and I try to change them, but I have not been asking for help from my Back Up like I used to.  I haven't been talking to Dad as often as I want to - it's like Frank said once, "We stop praying because things are kind of ok, and then when we think about praying it's scary and we don't want to so we put it off some more."


It's like being an artist: I have an idea - a beautiful, new idea - and I want desperately to start working on it, so desperately that I arrange all my tools and the bits that I'm going to use and set up the workspace and make the time in my calendar and then...Then I can't touch knife to paper, I can't properly mix the colors, I can't choose the bits that are most important.  And the thing that holds me back is fear.


I'm like that in relationships, too.  I spend time with someone, I like them and they like me, and we talk about being more serious.  And I want - I ache for - that.  But then it comes right down to it, and I start thinking about all the ways that I could hurt them or they could hurt me and how we'd be much safer if we waited or just didn't... Fear.


Since my last relationship ended, Dad's taught me a lot about fear.  Mostly in financial and job situations.  I am terrified of money - I loathe it.  But it's entirely necessary.  And I'm scared to interview, to start a new job, but new jobs mean pay raises, and pay raises mean more money, and more money means less fear (supposedly).  We worked through all that, He and I.  Now I have a new job and a good salary and more than I could have asked for.  And you'd think I could apply those lessons to relationships, to art, to life.  But I can't - at least not fully or well.


I'm taking steps at least - in a couple areas.  I'm working on hiring an illustrator for one of my shorter pieces.  And I'm going to try the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) - it's November (and there are no penalties for failing - only good can come of that one).  And we're moving forward on house buying talks.  *Sigh.  Hi, my name's Jess, and I'm a chicken.

If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start.

“If we try to overcome self-consciousness by any common-sense method, we will develop it tremendously. Jesus says, "Come unto Me and I will give you rest," i.e., Christ-consciousness will take the place of self-consciousness. Wherever Jesus comes He establishes rest, the rest of the perfection of activity that is never conscious of itself.”  (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost, August 20, via StudyLight.org)

…the perfection of activity that is never conscious of itself… that’s painting, or writing, or doing what I was created to do – creating, itself.  Like Madeleine L’Engle said – we were created for nothing other than to create, like our Master.  And Chambers describes that self-conscious-less state when a painter forgets himself and opens up to the creation, when a writer is so overcome by the words that she loses her grasp on her present time and place, when a sculptor thrills to the touch of his tools so much that sleep and food are unnecessary.