A preacher I once heard said this, “A Christian needs three things for a successful prayer life: a quiet heart, a quiet hour and a quiet place.” And sometimes in the busy affairs of everyday life it’s hard to find a “secret place” where it’s just you and God.
And sometimes that search can even
get a little comical.
When I was at Fort Carson,
Colorado and a fairly new Christian, I wanted to find a place to pray during some
down time in my military police academy training. I thought, well, what better place than the
post chapel. I stopped in and asked if
they had a place that I could spend some time in prayer. By the look on their faces, I could tell that
they had never had that question before and they pointed to a place on the
other side of a folding dividing wall. I
found a chair to kneel at and commenced to quietly communicate with my heavenly
Father. At one point I could hear one of
the chapel staff say to another soldier in hushed tones, “There’s a guy over
there…and HE’S PRAYING!!! Can you believe that???” (I added the last “Can you believe that?”
phrase…but that’s how it seems it should have ended.)
After our first daughter was born,
we attended a small Bible College in Ellendale, North Dakota. Raising a family
and renting a small house meant that there wasn’t much opportunity at home to
find a place to pray, so at times I would take the car out into the country to
seek the Lord. Sometimes I spent the hour walking and praying in a cemetery
(only during the day of course – and not in the winter). Sometimes I walked
down a railroad track next to the cemetery about a quarter of a mile and spent
the time seeking the Lord under the train trestle. One time while doing this I
turned around and there was a little old lady standing directly behind me! Scared
me half to death! She said she was looking for wild asparagus. I wanted to
blurt out that I was looking for wild broccoli (she’d never believe I was
“praying”). I never saw her walking to my railroad bridge secret place, and
come to think of it, I never saw her leave. So I figured she must have been
some sort of asparagus angel.
After I became an official pastor,
I obviously had to become more professional in my approach to finding a secret
place. We lived right behind the church (a converted barn) in a small town in
southwestern North Dakota. I usually went to the church at 5:00 am to pray for
a couple of hours. And it was always just me and the Lord. But one morning when
it was really quiet and really dark, suddenly I saw the image of a hand slowly
reach between the two sanctuary doors. I was paralyzed with fear – my knees
were almost knocking together. Was this Daniel chapter 5 all over again??? (“Suddenly
the fingers of a human hand emerged…then the king’s face became pale and
his thoughts alarmed him, and his hip joints loosened and
his knees began knocking together.” Daniel 5:5-6). Fortunately for me, it
turned out to be one of the church members who decided to join me for prayer
(and scare me half to death).
When I attended church
conferences in the city of Bismarck, I would sometimes leave the motel quite
early and go to the cemetery just down the highway to pray. On one occasion,
after praying for an hour or so, when I went to start the car, the battery was
dead (go figure). Now what? Fortunately for me, someone had recently passed
from this world into the next and a couple of workers were preparing for a
funeral, so I asked them if they could provide a jump. They brought over the
cables, hooked it up, and hollered, “CLEAR!” (Not really, but that would have
been funny. Or I could have hollered in my best Dr. Frankenstein imitation, “He’s
ALIVE!).
Another time the battery died
after I had been praying for a while in a park in Fargo, North Dakota (I must not
have been able to find a cemetery). We were visiting my wife’s parents for the
holidays. It was 7:00 on Christmas morning and it was zero degrees outside. I
saw lights come on in a house not too far away so I knocked on the door. I
wanted to say, “Ho Ho Ho – do you have any jumper cables?” The man of the house
kept looking over my shoulder as though he was expecting Rudolph to jump out of
the bushes and take all of their Christmas gifts.
When my wife and I and two
daughters visited my family, it also proved difficult finding a place to pray. It
says in Matthew 6:6 that you should “enter your closet and pray.” So on this
occasion, I went into a real closet – an upstairs linen closet outside of the
bedroom that our daughters slept in. It was just big enough for me to squeeze
into. I can’t remember how long I had been praying…it probably wasn’t too long
as my claustrophobia was kicking in. I heard my sister come up the stairs and ask
my wife, “Where’s Danny?” My wife pointed to the linen closet. The door opened slowly
and I almost fell out. My sister looked down at me with a disdainful look that
said, “This is my college educated brother?”
And one other highlight on this
journey to finding a secret place. It was the summer of 1988 and my family and
I were going to candidate for a church in Florence, Colorado. We spent the
night in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the morning I left the motel early and drove our
Plymouth Horizon to what I thought was going to be a pretty secluded spot in
the country.
It wasn’t. It was the intersection of a couple of
highways where the morning going-to-work traffic streamed into Cheyenne.
I reclined the driver’s seat and
was praying pretty fervently (if I remember correctly, I was praying somewhat
loudly in my “heavenly prayer language”). Suddenly there was a tap-tap on the
window. It was the Sheriff! I rolled the window down and said, “Hello Officer.”
She asked what I was doing.
I said I was praying. I didn’t
tell her that I was praying in a language that I had never learned and that may
not be known on earth but that the Holy Spirit had supernaturally given it to
me as a gift to communicate with my unseen Heavenly Father in an unfettered
way.
If I had, I might still be in
jail.
“Riiiiiiiiigggggghhhhhtttttttttt.
Can I see your driver’s license?”
I gave it to her and she went
back to her patrol car. She and her partner were in there for quite a while. I
figured they were asking headquarters to check their wanted posters for anyone
matching my description.
They let me go. Good thing. If
they had arrested me and taken me to jail, how would I explain that to my wife?
“Honey, you’ll never guess where
my secret place is today…no, not a cemetery…IT’S A JAIL!”
