Prayer Richard Foster
Dear Jesus, how desperately I need to learn to pray. And yet, when I am honest I know that I often do not even want to pray. I am distracted! I am stubborn! I am self-centred! In your mercy, Jesus, bring my ‘want-er’ more in line with my ‘need-er’ so that I can come to want what I need. In your name and for your sake, I pray. –Amen.
Pg 17
In our own way you and I will pray this Prayer of the Forsaken if we seek the intimacy of perpetual communion with the Father. Times of seeming desertion and absence and abandonment appear to be universal among those who have walked this path of faith before us. We might just as well get used to the idea that, sooner or later, we too will know what it means to feel forsaken by God. The old writers spoke of this reality as Deus Absconditus –the God who is hidden.
Sometimes God seems to be hidden from us. We do everything we know. We pray. We serve. We worship. We live as faithfully as we can. And still there is nothing . .
I am sure you understand that when I speak of the absence of God, I am talking not about a true absence but rather a sense of absence. God is always present with us –we know that theologically –but there are times when he withdraws our consciousness of his presence.