Do you ever just get fed up with the world? Tired of ambiguous relationships and chronic drama? At this moment, I want to bury myself in a book and never speak to another fucked-up person. Ha! As if I could survive five minutes without talking! But I am truly frustrated with relationships. I feel like everyone just keeps doing the same old stupid crap, and I am supposed to sit here and complacently endure the emotional burden of their confusion. Sigh. So I have been forced to pray a lot. Forced because I shamefully admit that it is not my initial inclination to run to the Almighty. In the process, I have remembered how vital prayer is, not only for the cathartic and clarifying affect it has but for the genuine impact it has in altering the structure of the world. The simple acknowledgment of reality brings freedom. I admit my inadequacy and powerlessness and rely on the ultimate reality of God. I have been lamenting, sometimes crying the Psalms, which I highly recommend. They are so honest, even abrasive, and demand action from God. In order for true growth to happen in our relationship with God, there must be genuine dialogue between us and God. We must have the ability to assert our will against God, especially in matters of justice. If we are confined to being submissive and docile to God, we only have the capability of praise. God, then, becomes the underwriter of the social norm. Slowly, God becomes irrelevant as we realize he/she is not going to change any of the reality we face. God is shallow and impotent. Brueggeman writes,

The lament makes an assertion about God: that this dangerous, available God matters in every dimension of life. Where God’s dangerous availability is lost because we fail to carry on our part of the difficult conversation, where God’s vulnerability and passion are removed from our speech, we are consigned to anxiety and despair and the world as we now have it becomes absolutized. Our understanding of faith is altered dramatically, depending on whether God is a dead cipher who cannot be addressed and is only the silent guarantor of the status quo, or whether God can be addressed in risky ways as the transformer of what has not yet appeared.

Wow. So... go ye therefore and pray.