'Even an intimate human friend is ill used if we talk to him about one thing while our mind is on another, and even a human friend will soon become aware when we are doing so. ... It may well be that the desire can be laid before God only as a sin to be repented; but one of the best ways of learning this is to lay it before God. Your problem, however, was not about sinful desires in that sense; rather about desires, intrinsically innocent and sinning, if at all, only by being stronger than the triviality of their object warrants. I have no doubt at all that if they are the subject of our thoughts they must be the subject of our prayers -- whether in penitence or in petition or in a little of both: penitence for the excess, yet petition for the thing we desire.
If one forcibly excludes them, don't they wreck all the rest of our prayers? If we lay all the cards on the table, God will help us moderate the excesses. But the pressure of things we are trying to keep out of our mind is a hopeless distraction. As someone said, 'No noise is so emphatic as the one you are trying not to listen to.'
C.S.Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm. (4)
I've been trying to live this out for the last couple of weeks, praying for all that is on my mind in a mix of penitence and petition. With some success. God does indeed order the cards when we place them all before him.
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