Last night I was laying in bed awake for hours because I drank a pumpkin latte about two minutes before bed after having a huge cup of coffee before that–fail.

While I was laying there, I started thinking about God and why I don’t like praying, or at least don’t like stopping and taking the time to pray. I love God, I want to know him better and be closer to him, so why is prayer so hard? All at once, I knew why it was so hard–because it feels like God isn’t there, it feels like I’m talking to myself or the walls, and it feels foolish to talk to oneself. I thought if God were sitting across the table from me sharing a cup of coffee and that were prayer, then I would pray a lot more–and I would pray much differently. Instead of asking for so much stuff (please do this, fix that, provide this) I would just ask questions after question. I would ask God why he is complicated and confusing to me and why the Bible can be so hard to understand. I would ask him a thousand questions and we would talk for hours. But God doesn’t sit across from me at the kitchen table and that is when it occurred to me that the darkest part of the fall was not sin but the fact that sin puts a veil of darkness between me and God. After all, before sin, God did sit across from us at the kitchen table so to speak–he walked with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the evening and they talked and talked. Then sin entered in and darkness came between us and there is no walking with God in the garden anymore–of course God is with us and he hears our prayers but what a loss of closeness.

Someday that dark veil will be removed and we will walk with him again and I will ask all my questions whether they matter at that point or not. Until then, the dark veil remains and I must learn to pray in spite of that darkness–but I’ll pray differently now–I’ll pray with the hope that someday I will walk with God in the garden in the cool of the evening and there will be no darkness between us.