The Hardest Prayer

“Not as I will, but as You will.” 

I think that has to be the hardest prayer to sincerely pray.

This is the prayer that Jesus repeats over and over again in the garden the night before He is to endure the agony of torture and crucifixion.  The Gospel writers tell us that at such an hour of turmoil, He was “sorrowful, even to death,” which is often a colloquialism for “suicidal,” (which is why He asked His friends to watch and pray with Him.  It’s never good to be alone when you’re suicidal).  That would explain why He was sweating droplets of blood (called hematohidrosis, a medical condition brought about from severe anguish).  And as God-in-the-flesh, He surely had options:  run away, call fourth a host of angels to save Him (that was Satan’s idea for Jesus while He was in the wilderness).

No.  “Not as I will, but as You will.”

I usually find it hard to pray this prayer while eating my morning bowl of cereal before starting the day, let alone while awaiting an impending crucifixion.  It’s so antithetical to the very way we’re wired.  The biological principle of natural selection posits that all life on this Earth—animal, plant, bacteria cell—all life has a self-interested impulse to out-muscle the competition to reach higher than your fellow fir trees lest they soak up the sunlight and you don’t, to find that wildebeest before the other lions do lest they eat and you starve.  Survival and self-interest and control are programmed into our genes.

“Not as I will, but as You will.”

Not to make a gross generalization, but I think the essence of the journey of faith to the New Jerusalem is learning not just to pray this prayer, but to fully mean it as well, to trust that at the very foundation of the cosmos is a powerful, loving, good God and that His way is ultimately better than any set of plans I could devise.  It is then that I am living the full life.

But first it starts with a prayer…