I woke up one day this week thinking about prayer and how much I really want to experience it again. How I want to know that the divine God of the universe, hears my voice and answers me. I used to believe that without question. It’s been awhile.

As I was thinking about it more this week, I had the most amazing thought about Jesus and how he went away into the wilderness to spend time with God whom he called his heavenly father. All of the sudden it struck me that when Jesus went to pray, he didn’t have to take the Bible with him. That may sound crazy to some of you, but as an Evangelical who was taught that to spend time with the divine being one must spend time with the Bible as the living and active “Word of God”, and because I was taught that Jesus was also the living Word of God, that to be with one was to be with the other — that to be reading the print on the pages of the Bible was how a Christian was instructed to spend time with Jesus/God. I was routinely taught that to pray the scriptures to God, was actually one of the most powerful ways to pray.

But Jesus… the man, did not use the Bible because… there was no Bible.

What a revelation!

Men told God stories, had visions and words of prophetic importance for the people who loved God. They wrote some of these things down and then more men assembled the pieces of it all together, bound them in between two covers and declared them holy. Jesus went into the wilderness and prayed to God … with none of it.

I want to be in touch with the God Jesus knew. I want to be in touch with the God the people who authored the Bible knew… a whole God – whatever, whomever and however that being was and will be present/

I’m rekindling a practice of prayer realizing I really do not need The Bible. I will see how it goes because somehow not needing to be in submission to the whole weight of the Bible makes me want to pray again.

Kinda wild, isn’t it?