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Verse:One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. —Luke 6:12, NIV
I especially like the places in the Bible that describe Jesus slipping away from the chaos and crowds that followed Him to find a solitary place to pray and connect with His Father. We all need those times, but sadly, in the hustle and bustle of work, family, and life, we often put quiet, focused prayer time at the bottom of our daily list.
My husband and I own a tractor-trailer.
It is a machine, and machines wear out and break, and I dread the days when he tells me the truck will not start. This happened recently, and while I wondered how the bills would get paid, he jumped in to troubleshoot the problem.
He connected jumper cables between the big truck battery and our pickup truck battery, and the big truck fired right up! But when he disconnected the cables, the truck stopped running. When he hooked them back up, it started right up again.
He soon figured out that the big truck battery was so dead it needed a longer time hooked to the other battery to build up enough charge to keep it running. After enough time had passed, he unhooked the cables, and the big truck continued to run, now fully charged with help from the pickup truck battery. “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16, NIV). Jesus spent His days eating, sleeping, and living with twelve men of various personalities who, let us be honest, were exhausting at times.
Crowds of needy people pressed in close as they followed Him. People wanted to be healed. They wanted to be fed. They wanted to ask questions and hear Him preach. The Pharisees who followed were always challenging and criticizing Him.
He was pushed, pulled, and stretched every day in every way, and while He never complained, He often withdrew for long moments to plug back in to His Father. Prayer is our spiritual jumper cable. We cannot run on an empty battery, no matter how hard we try—and we do try! Instead we need to remember the example Jesus gave us. We need to make it a priority to step away, find a quiet place, and recharge every day.
Jesus did, and He was both God and Man.
If God recognized a need to recharge, we, my human friends, are no different.
Pam Carbaugh