Hustle Prayer Quotes

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

That day will never come. I’ll be the last bachelor standing.” Dylan made a show of looking at his watch. “And if I hustle, I can still meet, mingle and be the answer to some woman’s sexual prayers. Let’s hit it before she settles on second best.

I began realizing it was okay to just sit with Him instead of always reading and journaling prayers or hustling off to the next bible study. It was okay to just be still. It was possible to find Him in the immense stillness, the hidden parts of my heart. He was always there in my hiddenness.

For the next hour and a half we did the “Baxter Hurry Scurry,” and at two minutes to ten we hustled up the stairs of

Sharing trauma (or even good things) with the Internet world, while we’re in the middle of it, short-circuits the process. It crosses the wires and creates sparks. Loud sparks—noise. Adoration. Comments like We love you! We are cheering for you! Oh, I’m so sorry! But sparks usually mean a bad connection. What if God wants to speak to us alone? Do we trust he has what it takes? I’m not saying to walk through hardship and trauma alone. You need your support system and community. In fact, I remember how much our close friends and family rallied with us during the miscarriage. Meals. Flowers. The sweetest cards. Prayers written out over text. Help with the kids. I’m more concerned about the healing part. Sometimes we share too quickly with the world—the Internet, the fringe friends, the public record—before we have truly processed, dealt with it, healed. The minute we do that, the decibel level becomes too loud, and we can no longer hear Jesus. He gets drowned out. And he’s the place of true wholeness and restoration. In a painful but true way. In obscurity. We need to simply sit with Jesus without pithy prayers. We need to ask for his help and know that he sees us. While healing won’t come overnight, we know we aren’t going through this alone.

Right now, Harlem is delicious. On the corner of 125th and Frederick Douglass Avenue, I turn my head south and see Little Senegal steeped in barter and food. Then I look north. Charles' Country Pan Fried Chicken is beyond my sight, but I know it's there. Smothered pork chops, hoppin' John, and fried chicken so good it makes you believe in prayer. Charles and his soul food is not alone. When hidden or right on an avenue, Harlem is cooking. An entire neighborhood is draped in spice and smells: cumin, garlic, brown sugar. And if that's not enough, take a peek and pause at the folks selling a heart's desire: wooden bracelets, gold-plated necklaces, sun dresses, bed sheets, Jamaican beef patties. You are in Harlem.

A PRAYER We confess we live distracted lives, and our insides often shake with constant activity. We have grown accustomed to ignoring our low-grade anxiety, thinking that it’s just a normal part of an active life. This might be typical, and it might be common. But let it not be normal. Instead of trying to figure out how to calm the chaos and hustle around us, we rejoice with confidence that we don’t have to figure our way back to the light and easy way of Jesus, because you have already made your way to us. We have your Spirit living within us, which means there’s hope for us after all. You invite us into each moment to simply do the next right thing in love.

down instead of from Twenty-Third Street looking up—things look quite a bit different. From that angle, the annoyed, hustling and bustling, highly important people angling their way through the obstacle course of onlookers seem insignificant. Our sun and moon and eight planets are just one little neighborhood among an estimated 200 billion neighborhoods that make up our universe.19 If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.20 Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight.21 When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there.22 That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.23 “So, yes, Chelsea art dealer, you are very important. But when we think about what we’re all gazing at while you make your agitation known through grunts and mumbles, you’re also impossibly young, urgently expiring, and unbelievably small.” You and I see the world with our own two eyes, and from that minuscule perspective, we tend to convince ourselves that we are (or at least should be) in control, directing our own lives, and scripting our future. We come back again to the truth that Philip Yancey reminded us of earlier in the chapter: “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” God is the one who calls us to “be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 8 marvels at this very wonder: