I hate blogs where I show you my deep, personal flaws, not because I hate blogs about deep, personal flaws—I just hate when they’re my flaws. Having said that, let me explain my situation and see if you can relate (if not, feel free to judge me with every form of self-righteousness). I hope you can indulge a bit of personal introspection during this blog…just imagine it is another growing moment like the author of Ecclesiastes tries to get us to see. 

At the end of 2018 and the first few days of 2019, I went on vacation to the (mostly) snow (or ice) covered winter wonderland that is Lake Tahoe. Some friends of mine, and their kids, rented a large house together to get away, relax, and have some fun. We enjoyed ice skating, snowboarding, sledding, movie watching, cold picture taking, snowmobiling, eating, cooking, thrift shopping (we call this “poppin’ tags”), and beverage consuming. We watched TV shows, played pool and games together…the only thing we didn’t do together, until almost the last day, was pray.

I felt so tired at the end of most days, still recovering from the year, that I essentially found a spot and interacted sporadically with others (unless it was in the form of a video game). When the last evening there rolled around, I had finally come out of my funk enough to be cognizant at dinnertime. It was then I realized we hadn’t said thanks to God for any meal the entire week. You have to understand that this is odd for me, because I typically do say “grace” over every meal. During the whole time away I did pray and read my Bible every morning, but for some reason, I never even realized that we hadn’t prayed as a group.

I hope anyone who went with us on this vacation doesn’t take this blog as an indictment in any way, because it’s not. I was simply astounded at how easy it was to forget to thank God in one of the most stress-free and mundane ways possible. I have asked myself over the last few days why it is easier for me to personally remember my own prayer time, but forget the great beauty and joy of corporate prayer. Everyone on vacation with us was in a GC or happens to be a GC leader, so it is not like they would have been surprised or offended by praying. As a matter of fact, they all would have gladly jumped in! But…none of us seemed to remember. Isn’t that odd?

As I have processed the last couple of weeks, I think part of it came to down to our comfort with one another. No one felt like they had to impress anyone else, or be more “spiritual” than we actually were, but I also think another part of vacation is that we leave our “normal life” for something that is “other.” We step away from routine and do something different, which makes us forget the various habits, good and bad, we have in our lives. I hope I am not overanalyzing this too much, but it makes me start to worry that corporate prayer for me is more of a habit, rather than daily heartfelt remembrance. I want to open my eyes and my heart to naturally fall in love with Jesus in such a way that prayer flows out of me wherever I am…maybe I am just not as enamored with Jesus as I thought.

Or…maybe this is exactly what God wanted to me to experience as a sort of wake-up call, to see the natural inclination of my heart. To be honest, the natural tendency of my heart is toward self-centeredness even in the moments when I think am the least self-centered. Moments that open my eyes, like this vacation, are God’s grace to me, reminding me not of His disappointment or judgment, but of His gentle love that leads me back to Him. I can so easily forget God at times, but He has never once forgotten about me! Throughout that entire vacation, God was there with me. Though I forget to pray and speak with Him, He is consistently speaking and leading me…and if he does it for a knucklehead like me, He also does it for all of you.

In Matt 28:20 Jesus reminds His disciples that He will be with them “even to the end of the age.” If you look at the disciples’ lives, you will see many times where they seemed to forget Him, but Jesus promises not to forget them. Psalm 94:18-19 the writer cries out that he is slipping (maybe he went on vacation and it snowed too much for his car to stop on the downhill), but then he says, “Your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.” The writer says this because he understands that God’s love for us is not dependent on our effort, but upon who God Himself is.

This is what makes me want to remember to pray, to want to thank God when I am alone, and to want to thank Him when I am with others. It is God’s steadfast love first given to me, the same love given to you. That is what makes me thankful and that is what God teaches me even when I forget. What does God need to remind you of when you forget Him?