Every Athlete Excercises Discipline In Every Way. 1 Cor. 9: 25, 27

“A young girl sat at the knee of an old silversmith, watching as he placed a gnarled chunk of tarnished silver into a crucible, put it into the furnace, and asked him what he was doing. He said, “I do this to purify the silver.” She saw how intently he stayed by the fire, peering at the silver in the white flames. “Why do you watch it so intently?” she asked. “To know when it is pure,” he answered. “How do you know when it is pure?” “I’ll know it is pure when I can see my own image on its surface,” said the old man. “And so it is with God. He puts us in the fire and watches us intently, never turning away. And we will be pure, too, when he can see His image within our souls.”

I encountered this little story some time ago. It is a parable in its own way, and it has stuck with me. We have no difficulty seeing this life as a crucible of sorts. No one escapes suffering, whether small or great. Those challenges surely do ‘test our mettle’. Like that silver, God made us pure. We all get tarnished by life in some way. We bend our wills to temptations of all sorts rather than to God’s will, and, in doing so, we lose some of the luster that God made us in and desires us to be.

There is another image that carries deep meaning for me, too. It is that each of us has within us a “God-shaped hole that yearns to be filled. But the world is full of noise, crowded with a kaleidoscope of distractions. How are we to deal with this noise, these distractions? We need to find places of silence and deep solitude within our days where the Great Mystery of God can come to us and fill that hole, and make his home there. Until then, we are too often lost in a distorted pretense shaped by our own egos. The reason and the means to fill that God-shaped hole is prayer. We need to develop the desire and the habit of taking ourselves out of the noise and away from the distractions of phones, social media, and the like, daily.

In order to do this, we can make a special place in our homes, a kind of sacred space, where we can take ourselves apart for a few minutes each day and make time for God. It should be a place for quiet, focused time for God. This is not easy, to be sure, because distractions have a way of getting in the way of the process. I know from my own experience how hard it can be, but God knows our innermost being. He knows when our hearts and minds have turned to him, and he is always ready to respond instantaneously. Prayer is a desire for a relationship, and that’s what God is all about. This is a poem I wrote about my own experience relating to the hard work of prayer and the role of patient endurance in the face of distractions. It is all about attitude.

The daily discipline of prayer is the most effective means to open that God-shaped hole in our hearts to the only Person who can fill it, completely. It is hard work. Like training for athletic pursuits, prayer requires disciplined, hard work. Paul tells us, “Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we do it for an imperishable one…No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:25,27). This is the reason for the discipline of prayer. Prayer is the crucible that can purify our hearts, minds, and souls. It is the means by which we can let God fill that God-shaped hole within us.