The Day Carol Prayed
by Christine Caine
Sophia is the Greek word for Wisdom, and Propel Sophia seeks out the voices of truly wise women and asks them to share worked examples of how they express faith in daily life. Pull up a chair at Sophia’s table, won’t you? There’s plenty of space.
LEARN MORE HERE ▸
I’ll never forget the first time I got a glimpse of someone praying who wasn’t a priest. I was just fourteen at the time, taking religion classes in school, and I watched and listened as a woman
prayed—in English, no less. It was the 1980s, and religious education was a compulsory requirement in Australia’s school system.
When there weren’t enough teachers, mums were recruited to teach us. The mum who taught me was Carol, and her depiction of what a life in Christ looked like was far different from what I had been raised to understand. I grew up knowing who Jesus was, of course; in fact, he was gloriously depicted with statues, on stained-glass windows, on prayer cards, and in books. But the Jesus I knew was more of an icon than anything else.
Carol had been saved in the seventies, in the age of the Jesus Movement and coffee-shop revivals, and week after week, I sat mesmerized, listening to her stories of how Jesus radically changed her life. She had been a biker, addicted to drugs, and was dropping acid when Jesus got her attention.
Now, every Tuesday, after she shuttled her three kids off to their schools, she showed up at ours and taught us what she knew. It wasn’t volumes, and certainly not anything you would expect from someone with a seminary education, but it was enough to captivate me and a handful of my friends. She had me hanging on her every word.
What caught my attention most was that Carol started and ended every class time with prayer. I had never heard anyone talk to the God of the universe as if he was their best friend. And when Carol prayed, she sounded so normal. She didn’t have some weird voice saved especially for churchy things. Instead, she just talked to Jesus. Like she really knew him.
The idea of talking to Jesus, and then expecting him to communicate back in some way, was profound to me. I had grown up thinking he was too busy with all the big things in this world to ever have time for me, but Carol prayed as though she expected him to have time for her and for us all. She seemed to think Jesus cared personally and intimately about every one of us. That was revolutionary to me. How could I not at least consider praying to a God like that?
Carol made prayer so understandable for me. So relatable. Listening to her pray, it seemed like a conversation. It made me want to talk to a God who seemed to want to listen to me.
I understand, depending on our spiritual upbringing, that prayer can sound lofty or even boring, but it is in prayer that we learn how to trust him. It is in prayer that we remember God is great, sovereign, and all-powerful. It is in prayer that we can bring our concerns, anxieties, worries, and cares to God. It is in prayer that we confess our sins and receive forgiveness. It is in prayer that we can ask God to meet all our needs. It is in prayer that we can do spiritual warfare and prevail in his power. It is in prayer that we can give thanks to, worship, and praise God. It is in prayer that we can be still and wait on God. That we can develop intimacy with God. That we can get to know him and feel known by him.
Isn’t that what we are all looking for? To be seen? To be heard? To be known? To be loved? Being in close proximity to someone regularly is a huge component in keeping us from drifting away from them. In keeping us anchored emotionally with them. So it is with us and God through prayer.
Prayer is a privilege. An honor. A delight. Talking to and listening to our heavenly Father, with nothing and no one standing between us, is something we get to do. Having grown up in a world where I failed to realize that I could talk straight to God, that nothing could separate me from the presence of God (Rom. 8:31–39), this was astounding to me. I had no idea that when Jesus died on the cross, the veil in the temple was “torn in two” (Matt. 27:51), much less what it meant. Later, I learned the veil was a curtain in the temple separating the people from the holy of holies, where the earthly presence of God dwelt.
Right after Jesus’ death, the veil literally split from top to bottom, meaning that any and all go-betweens, like Old Testament priests, New Testament religious leaders, even the priests I had grown up learning from and listening to, were no longer necessary for me to talk to God.
Do you realize what this means for you and me today? As children of God, we can run to the very throne of God. The writer of Hebrews said, “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need”(4:16).
That means we have access! The God of the universe has given us access to be with him, any time of the day or night. Because he wants to be with us! We literally have an open invitation to run to the throne room,full of confidence that God wants to hear what we have to say.There is nothing—no mistake, no past, no sin, no person, no shame—that can block our access to God.
