African neighborhoods are partly fun because there are often animals loitering.

And one of the most vivid sights are goats stepping on maize seeds laid to dry, or kicking the toddler’s porridge cup while mummy stretches the mat for the toddlers.

This untethered goat reminds me of how I often am tempted to pray, it’s fun to declare highly optimistic pronouncements upon my life in ‘Jesus name’ but I am learning, as long as my prayers are not rooted in what God reveals in scripture- I am are more like an untethered goat kicking porridge cups.

I go about untethered, and therefore uncontrolled, often babbling, without the great shepherd, who is the word itself, whose truth is written to sanctify us.

Timothy Keller, in his book, Prayer; experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. quotes from another book, Eugene Petersons’ Answering God. I will just relay the quote here.

“Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God we manage to understand. But what is critical is that we speak to a God who speaks to us… There is a difference between praying to an unknown God whom we hope to discover in our praying, and praying to a known God, revealed through Israel and Jesus Christ, who speaks our language. In the first, we indulge our appetite for religious fulfillment, in the second, we practice obedient faith. The first is is a lot more fun, the second is a lot more important, what is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but we learn to answer God.”

This quote stings me, because the temptation of my prayer life is to pray more ‘fun things,’ things I would die to see happen, things a little more interesting, things I badly crave to see in my future, things not necessarily bad but things not often in God’s wise will.

I don’t know about your prayer life, but this is the likely weakness of my prayers, to settle for God’s will above my immediate pangs often feels like radical compliance, the same way a goat feels with a rope on its hoaf, even if the rope is meant to restrain it from unforeseen danger.