by Jamin Goggin
Prayer is fundamentally relational, and therefore it is humanizing. In prayer we are awakened to the calling of our humanity. Seeking to be independent, in control, and powerful dehumanizes us and leads to the dehumanization of others. These are the places where one’s soul goes to die. These efforts lead only to a desert of isolation.
Prayer, in contrast, is a place of abiding. In prayer we are called to be with the sovereign Creator of the universe as finite creatures. We are called to posture ourselves as those in need of the all-powerful and all-knowing One. We do not simply embrace this posture by sheer willpower or consistent reminders. To be with God in the truth of our finitude can only be learned in prayer. It is, in many ways, synonymous with prayer. When we encounter God in truth and have the reality of our creaturely limitations mirrored back to us, then we come to experience our finitude in grace.
Our lives are filled with experiences that mirror the reality that we are finite. Some are fleetingly presented to us throughout the mundane corridors of our lives, and others are earth-shattering events that alter our existence. Perhaps we cannot remember an important meeting we scheduled. Perhaps we discover we are powerless to keep our teenage child from making bad decision after bad decision. We all have strategies to avoid seeing the truth that we are finite. We know the easiest ways to distract ourselves and escape reality. We know people we can go to who are sure to tell us what we want to hear, and we have tried-and-true psychological techniques that will help us prop up whatever false selves we need to embrace in order to avoid the reality that we are dust. We know deep down that these strategies will fail in true prayer, so when we go to God, we simply rattle off a list of things we want, pepper it with requests for others to relieve our feelings of guilt, and get out as fast as we can to avoid the experience of failure and brokenness before God.
Our great mistake is to see our brokenness, our finitude, and our sin as things that keep us from God rather than as opportunities to throw ourselves at the foot of the cross and grasp his grace. These opportunities should be embraced, not because our sin is not important, but because God has proclaimed “It is finished” from the cross. When we lust yet again, when we gossip yet again, when we erupt in anger at our kids yet again, we are confronted with our inability to eradicate such darkness from our lives. Healing comes only by walking with God through our brokenness, never by avoiding it and pretending it isn’t there. Unfortunately, instead of resting in God in these times, we turn to self-help, buying in to the lie that God wants us to fix our lives before we depend on him. We often use these strategies of avoidance when we are faced with the reality that we are unable to produce any genuine spiritual transformation on our own. In moments of honesty we come to grasp that no amount of self-discipline or theological acumen erases our sinful habits. We are faced with the truth that we are helpless to truly enact change. In fact, we are limited in our ability even to understand what needs to be changed, much less change it. All this should lead us to prayer, to the God who knows we are dust yet calls us to himself.
A few years ago I (Jamin) was faced with my finitude vividly and painfully: I lost my job. I didn’t see it coming. I had just become a first-time homebuyer. To add further complexity, I was caring for my then four-month-pregnant wife who was on strict bed rest with our first child. I felt exposed, ashamed, and angry. As I listened to my boss explain the reasons for my release, a bit of the finitude crept to the surface. I couldn’t magically fix the anemic church budget. I had no power to change the decision that would inevitably reverberate in every area of my life. The realities mirrored my limitations. I didn’t see it coming, and I couldn’t stop it. Yet I still held on to some natural hope. I was able to extinguish the initial realization of my finitude by envisioning other job possibilities and strategizing how I would get an even better job. My own pride did not allow the truth that I was dust to be truly recognized and experienced.
Before long, losing my job unraveled into a season of unemployment. Job opportunity after job opportunity would come and go. Each potential job would lead to multiple rounds of interviews, inevitably hearing that I was a “great candidate,” but someone else was a “better fit.” As each potential opportunity evaporated, my wife’s due date crept closer and closer. I was going to have to provide for a wife and a child. Somehow, amid all the other concerns, the reality of being responsible for a family had not captured my attention completely. The truth of my finitude bubbled to the surface again, and this time it poured over the edge. At first I tried to avoid the tidal wave. I focused on all the avenues I had not yet explored and began to craft a new plan. But I could not fix my situation with self-engineered hope and reinvigorated willpower. Consequently, I moved to hopelessness and despair. I would dwell on what happened and then beat myself up for not finding another job. I would escape and avoid facing the truth by reading a book or perusing the Internet. Eventually, I was a tornado of frailty, insecurity, and shame. I was seeing the truth, but still not receiving it. I had run the gamut of strategies to avoid actually embracing the reality of my finitude. Then the strategies of managing and avoiding my situation were stripped away. Within that place of chaos, I began to hear the call of God and the truth he had for me. He was teaching me the truth of my identity—that I was limited, needy, and feeble. Ultimately, I could not control my world. All my best efforts could not guarantee me anything. I was not master of my universe, let alone the universe. He was teaching me that I am a creature and he is the Creator. He was teaching me that I am dust.
My prayer life during that time went from one end of the spectrum to the other. When I first lost my job, I was praying very little. Why pray? I needed to work my contacts and sharpen my résumé. However, as I struggled to find a job, I began to enter in to prayer. Even still, I was not entering in to prayer as one who was finite and in need of God, but rather as one who was more than capable of managing his life. Prayer was simply another one of my resources—it couldn’t hurt to have a little help from God. I was still in control. It was still ultimately up to me. It wasn’t until I was in a position of desperation that I began to truly pray. I began to cry outto God. I voiced my hurt. I shared my fears.
I listened for God’s guidance. Ultimately, I came to God as a finite creature, one who was desperate and needy. It was in prayer that I came not only to embrace my finitude, but to celebrate it, and rest in the truth that the Creator of the universe was with me. I came to celebrate the truth that I wasn’t God, but indeed I was known by God. In many ways, it was a violent lesson for me. I wrestled with God to maintain the delusion that I was in control of my life. By his grace God wounded me so that I might learn that limping with him in my finitude was better than running on my own.
My failure to embrace God immediately, and instead turning to my own ability, is something we all experience. We cease to grasp how finite we are. When we are confronted with the loss of a job, a broken relationship, financial problems, death, sickness, frustration, and hurt of any kind and we create strategies to deal with life and try to generate a better existence, we end up dehumanizing ourselves and others. When we reject what we are, we become less than what we were made to be. When we reject dependence on God, we usually do so because we believe that independence is the height of human achievement. Eventually, we will be reminded that we are dust. It may be when our bodies decay from old age, or it may happen much sooner, but the truth of God’s world is that the true human life is a life of prayer.
In prayer we learn what it is to be human. Prayer is the heart of a genuinely human existence. In prayer we learn to live in dependence on God; we learn to find life outside of ourselves in another person, Christ. In prayer we struggle to embrace our finitude, and therefore prayer is frustrating. We fail to see that we are using prayer as a means to something else, and therefore fail to see that prayer is frustrating because we are using it and rejecting relationship. We are like my little girl who wants to use prayer to get life on her terms. True prayer, instead, leaves us undone before a holy, powerful, and all-knowing God. Coming before God in truth will always unveil our finitude, or else we fail to grasp who God is and who we are. Standing before God entails grasping that all life should be lived in dependence on him.
We do not simply realize this truth, but come to embrace it in our hearts. As we receive God’s wisdom in prayer, we learn that life is intended to be lived in dependence on him. Just as the world seeks to seduce us to try and manipulate time, it also claims we can rise above our finitude. We can be immortal. When you hear the greatest professional athletes of our day talking about their legacies, they often equate championships with immortality. It will always be remembered, they think, therefore their memories will live on even when they are gone. This, of course, is foolishness. Trying to defeat our limitedness is fighting against our nature and seeking to live against the grain of who we are. It is the lie that has echoed throughout human history—we can be like God. Human history is, in many ways, the story of humanity seeking to be like God on its own, with an important plot of hope where God himself descends into time to provide a way to be like him. But we do not see the abundant life he offers; we see death and foolishness (John 10:10). Jesus claims we must lose our lives in order to save them (Matt. 10:39) and be last in order to be first (Mark 10:44). But even if our hearts cry out, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60) we need to proclaim with Peter, “Lord . . . You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69). True life is embracing Jesus, which means that true life is embracing the grace he has given us in our finite, limited existence. In all this we must learn to accept the posture of waiting upon the Lord.
Excerpt from Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself by Jamin Goggin