Get on Your Knees and Fight Like a Man

It’s no secret that I wish I was a teenager in the eighties.
Give me some high-top All Star Chuck Taylors, cassette tapes and face melting guitar solos any day and I will be happy. This is a little weird, I know, because I was born two years after the eighties were over. I think that my odd fascination with the era of Reagan and big hair comes from my early discovery and love for a band called Petra.
If you don’t know Petra, you are missing out on life. They were true pioneers in putting Christian lyrics to electric guitars (and the more than occasional synthesizer and key-tar).
I usually have any one song from their thirty-three year musical career playing in my head at some point in the day but lately I have been hearing one in my head that I hadn’t heard in forever. In 1987, Petra’s This Means War  album came out and on it was the song “Get on Your Knees and Fight Like a Man.”
Now out of context, this is kind of a funny title. Can you picture some big burly men getting into a brawl at a saloon and getting on their knees to proceed with their dual? For some reason the idea of midgets having a slap fight keeps playing in my head whenever I think about this. I don’t know about you, but I think that that is pretty hilarious. In fact, I keep trying to write this post but I am getting distracted by visions of angry midgets beating the mess out of each other.
But that is not what this song is even remotely about.
The verses of this song talk about being at the lowest point circumstantially than we ever could imagine. They talk about having the world fall on top of you and all your resources being exhausted and your options dwindling. Lately, I can relate.
This past week, God has been stressing to me the importance of what I thought an elementary truth, that is prayer. I thought I was good on this one. I mean, even non-Christians know that Christians are supposed to pray, I understand all that God.
I have always understood the importance of prayer but I don’t think I could honestly say that my life or even my schedule reflected that.
I want prayer in my life to be more than an emergency kit that I never use unless I absolutely need it. We seem to have this mentality that after we have done everything we know to do and our circumstances still haven’t changed then “all we can do is pray.”
All we can do? That makes it sound like that is the least promising thing we are capable of doing to get the results we need.
Why don’t we realize that going to the all-powerful, all-knowing, ever present God of the universe first before wasting our time with what we think we can do is the most logical thing we could ever do?
I know we all know this but do we really know  this?
I guess prayer is one of those things that is great in theory but can be boring in practice. When we think about radically following Jesus, we usually think about selling everything we own and moving to Africa or having the faith to tell that guy in a wheelchair that he is healed and should go run around the block. In the back of our mind, prayer just means turning off the T.V and sticking our face in the carpet while we try and think of what to say to God.
When I think about prayer, I am not usually thinking about the spiritual forces of good and evil colliding in epic war for humanity. I am secretly thinking about midgets slapping each other.
It sounds ridiculous and I am exaggerating a little bit but I think that is how we really view the effectiveness of getting on our face before God.
We are so action oriented that the idea of locking ourselves away to pray seems less effective than going out and trying to fix everything on our own.
I tell God all the time that I want to change the world but when was the last time I humbled myself to the point of getting on my face before Him in desperation to see Him move? A lot of times I think that I am O.K. if I just say a couple words of prayer under my breath for somebody. Sometimes I tell God that I am going to pray in my bed as I am falling asleep.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with praying like that but lately God has been showing me that there really is something to setting a part a certain amount of time and physically getting down on the floor and warring against the forces of evil.
It is really inconvenient, but doesn’t the effort you put into prayer reflect your passion for whatever you are praying for? What would your life look like if you got on your knees and fought like a man for an hour every day? Ooh an hour, that’s a little much. That would be really hard to commit to.
But if you are desperate enough to complain to the world about your problems, an hour can’t be so bad.
One thing I have found is that it is really easy to pray for yourself and your own problems. Sometimes we get discouraged when our prayers aren’t getting answered so we give up. What if, instead of praying for ourselves for an hour, we prayed for somebody else’s problems? I don’t know why but whenever I dedicate that much time to someone else, my prayers get answered and so do theirs.
If I can’t carry my burden, I’ll drop mine and pick up somebody else’s.
What can we change about our lives to reflect that we actually believe prayer is more than a midget slap fight but the opportunity to bring Heaven down into our problems? I want to spend more time praying that God will do something than I do hoping that He will bless me when I do something.