This really is an excellent post, and I’m glad to see that so many others think so. Having presided over more then a quarter-century of evangelical Prayer Meetings, I have quite often been struck by the difference– often a staggering one– between what I hear in church and what I read in the Bible, especially the Psalms.

Where is the honesty, the passion, the life? Why do so many people pretend that they cannot relate to the imprecatory Psalms, when we known darn well that we all do at times. It reminds me of something I once read about Victorian people referring to the legs of tables and chairs as “limbs,” lest they be regarded as being indelicate!

Too many evangelicals, at least many that I have worked with, have drunk deeply at those Victorian wells, whether they know it or not (and they generally don’t). Give me the earthy frankness of a Luther, raucously boasting (over good German beer, natürlich) of how he “chased the Devil away with a fart.” Now that’s a brother I could talk over a problem with, methinks!

An amateur actor in my Brooklyn church once told me that one of his favorite models for prayer was Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. He said that the famous milkman was one of the few people, real or fictitious, he’d ever seen who speak to God honestly.

I think of that often, and have learned from it. In fact, I have learned from it so much so that I am often quite uncomfortable with the prayer that, ex officio, I have to utter publicly. It feels so inauthentic compared to what transpires on my long walks with God (for some reason I can only really pray while walking about; sitting still the mind wanders hopelessly).

Why, I sometimes wonder, do I never hear Abraham’s bargaining session with the Almighty (Genesis 18) mentioned as one of the “great prayers of the Bible?” It’s absolutely marvelous, and I confess I have a hard time reading it aloud without starting to slip into character as Tevye.

And with that, I’m off for a few miles with Our Creator and Lord!