Jamin Bradley

Whenever it’s time to go outside, Galadriel always brings a toy with her. She knows I will take it from her at the door and that she can’t take it outside, but she decides it’s always worth asking anyway.

Jesus taught us to pray like this. In Luke 11, he told us to pray with “anaidĕia,” a Greek word we might translate as insolence, audacity, impudence, shamelessness, importunity, effrontery, impertinence, or as the ignoring of convention. In Luke 18, he told us to pray in a “hupōpiazō” way, where we wear someone out with our requests via annoyance and nagging. This word also carries connotations of giving someone a black eye, which adds a hyperbolic image to the idea of how persistent we might be with the same old requests.

Do you find yourself praying the same old prayer over and over again, waiting for an answer? Do you wonder sometimes if that prayer request is getting old? Then you are praying as Jesus taught. May we learn to pray with anaidĕia and hupōpiazō, while also discerning when the Spirit is responding in ways we don’t want to hear.