“We are unfinished creatures– longing, reaching, stretching towards fulfillment.  We express these desires for completion in prayer.  Prayers articulate our seeking after the best.  Prayers give voice to aspiration towards the highest.  Everything that is distinctly human gets formulated in prayers: our pathos, our nobility, our creativity.  Also interestingly, everything that is disreputable in us– lust, avarice, pride, pettiness– disguises itself in prayer in order, if possible, to get us credit instead of shame.  But either way, whether in disguise or in reality, prayers show us at our best.”

~ Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer

The race-less life is a prayer- filled life.  You cannot make this kind of declaration without your mind and heart being filled with a conversation that did not begin with you.  I didn’t start this dialogue.  I am merely responding to a prodding, to His questions and answers.  Eugene Peterson teaches us in Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer that prayer is answering God: “What is essential is not that we learn to express ourselves but that we learn to answer God.”

You cannot set your feet to this path, to decide to take this race-less journey if you have not packed prayer.  I continue to proclaim the race- less gospel of Jesus Christ not because of the encouragement of others but because of my conversations with God.  The hymn writer says, “He walks with me and He talks with me/ And he tells me that I am his own…”  I know that I will need it and that others may not be able to pray these kinds of prayers for race-lessness so I pack my own.

I am held together by prayer.   It is what keeps me together, what keeps my mind from wallowing in my history, what keeps my mouth from thinking the former things, what allows me to look in the mirror and see the new creature that God is creating.  Yes, it is true: “prayer changes things” but more importantly, prayer changes us.  I am race-less because I am prayer- filled.

During this season of Lent, why don’t you pray about becoming race-less.