Brian Heasley - Writing on the Wall: Prayers, Psalms and Laments of the Rising Culture

A very good time, if you know what I mean. Suddenly there was a screameveryone froze, staring in disbelief at the wall. Terrified, they watched as a disembodied hand appeared right before their eyes. God, it seemed, had decided to do some graffiti, right there on the plaster by the lamp stand. And this is what God had decided to write: Mene. Tekel.

Peres. Breathless, they located the old-man prophet and summoned him to the scene. He stumbled in, bleary with sleep, and somehow made sense of the writing on the wall. If the hand was to be trusted (and it seemed impolite to doubt it), the days of the king were numbered by divine decree. Apparently, the host with the most would soon be toast. And sure enough, that very night Belshazaar, king of the Babylonians, was slain (Daniel 5:30). *** God did graffiti.

Jesus drew in the sand. Cavemen painted the walls of their caves, and Michelangelo had a pretty good go at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. When Brian Heasley first contacted me to tell me that he had been moved to tears by a prayer written on the walls of his church, he suggested the name Writing on the Wall as a title for a compilation of such prayers from around the world. The 24-7 Movement has dozens of prayer rooms on the go all the time in all sorts of weird locations all over the world, and it occurred to Brian as he wept that night that there must be other prayers like the one he had just read. Prayers that impact people. Words that help us be honest with God.

Would it be possible to get some of these together, he wondered? A few days later I jumped on a plane from England to America, where I was due to speak to some churches and hang out with some friends. To my surprise, my old friends Robert and Andrea Jobe in Tulsa, Oklahomaknowing nothing of Brian's suggestionapproached me with exactly the same idea. They even had the same title in mind. Three different people on two different continents in just one week had come up with an identical concept: a book of non-religious prayers by ordinary people, full of passion and embarrassing honesty. This random collection of psalms and lamentations reflecting the spirituality of the emerging culture could, they said, be called Writing on the Wallan echo of the day God Himself showed up at a party and did graffiti.

It's ironic, because I help lead an international prayer movement, but it's true nonetheless. I'm bad at prayer. As a result of this spiritual incompetence, I always appreciate books full of ready-made prayers that help me in my devotional life and trigger my imagination with new language for our shared human experiences. As a teenager, I often turned to a hopelessly uncool book of poems called Prayers of Life by a Catholic priest named Michelle Quoist. These days, my bedside table carries a book of Celtic daily prayers and another compilation of Franciscan meditations. By my toilet you will find a book of prayers from Brennan Manning and The Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald.

Last week I sat in a recording studio in my friend's basement, thumbing through a dusty old copy of The Book of Common Prayer. However, my favorite prayer book of all time is the Psalter, King David's outrageously honest compilation of worship, intercession, grumbling and gratitude. There are very few churches today that would allow anyone to be as publicly angry and distressingly uncertain as David repeatedly is in the psalms. On the other hand, those more thoughtful groups that do permit a little messy questioning and occasional moaning often seem embarrassed by David's terminal charismania his irrepressible eruptions of jubilation, his moments of religious imperialism, his naked dancing in the street.