A rule of prayer

I've had reason of late to consider George Müller's thoughts on prayer. Müller was a Prussian-born evangelist credited with caring for over 10,000 British orphans during his lifetime in the 19th century, and educating a good many additional children. Müller was known for never accepting government assistance, and for never requesting money of anyone. His earnest faith was that if he did God's will, God would provide. As the story goes, there was a time in the early years of his orphanage when the food ran out. He had the children arranged around the dinner table regardless, in order to give thanks for the food God was going to provide. Soon there was a knock at the door; a bread truck had broken down outside, and the owner offered it to Müller rather than let it go to waste.

Rather than thanking God for what He will provide, I am usually asking Him not to take away what He has given. I wonder if I ever will come close to the assurance that seemed to inform Müller's life. For some time I have been taken with his guidelines for prayer, which are at once so practical and so difficult to follow. The first thing he did, he explained, was to strip himself of his own will. That doesn't mean that he adopted a stoic indifference to the outcome, but rather that he got himself to a place where he was willing to embrace the outcome, even if it's not what he desired.

That, Müller implied, was more than half the battle. It certainly is for me. I am a want-filled creature, hopeful and fearful all at once, and prone to ignore God until something I want or something I fear is directly in my field of vision. How strange, when prayer is so frequently the consequence of our immediate wants, to begin by praying that our own wills be sublimated.

In his exhaustive Civil War trilogy, Shelby Foote writes how Jefferson Davis, upon learning that his young son had plummeted to his death from an upper window, closed himself into a room, and could be heard pacing the entire night, saying over and over: "Not my will, but thy will." It was a prayer for the ability to submit, I'm sure, as much as a statement of faith. Maybe that's all our statements of faith ever are, prayers that we might be, if only for a short while, faithful, and faith-filled.