Mark Sorensen Grace and peace, friends.
Let me share a passage from a book that I have been re-reading recently that I have loved. The book is Present Over Perfect, by Shauna Niequist. In it, she talks about prayer and uses an illustration that really caught my attention.
Perhaps you’ve seen a bottle of salad dressing that contains vinegar and oil. As it sits on the shelf, the two separate leaving the vinegar on top and the oil below. In her chapter titled, “Vinegar and Oil,” Shauna shared that she’s coming to learn that that’s a pretty great metaphor for her prayer life.
Read on.
When you pray, pour out the vinegar first – the acid, whatever’s troubling you, whatever hurt you, whatever is harsh and jangling your nerves or spirit. You pour that out first – I’m worried about this child, or I’m hurt from this conversation. I’m lonely, I’m scared. I don’t know how this thing will even get fixed. Pour out all the vinegar until it’s gone.
Then what you find underneath is the oil, glistening and thick: We’re going to be fine. God is real and good and present and working… This is the grounding truth of life with God, that we’re connected, that we’re not alone, that life is not all vinegar – pucker and acidic. It is also oil, luscious, thick, heavy with history and flavor.
But you have to start with the vinegar or you’ll never experience the oil. Many of us learned along the way to ignore the vinegar – the hot tears banging on our eyelids, the hurt feelings, the fear. Ignore them. Stuff them. Make yourself numb. And then pray dutiful, happy prayers. But this is what I’m learning about prayer: you don’t get the oil until you pour out the vinegar.
That last sentence struck me: “But this is what I’m learning about prayer: you don’t get the oil until you pour out the vinegar.”
So good.
You know the actual olive oil comes from the pressing of the olives, right? It’s the crushing and pressing process that brings the rich oil as a result. Perhaps knowing this will cause you to read the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (See Matthew 26:36-46) in a different light. (Gethsemane, by the way, actually means, “oil press.”) What if it wasn’t a coincidence that it was here that Jesus goes to pray before His Father? Remember, It was here that, standing in the midst of olive trees on the eve of His betrayal and arrest, He goes to pour out the very vinegar of anxiety through His prayers to His Father, and we see the oil of that prayer as a result.
So what’s the takeaway?
Perhaps you have vinegar in your life. Perhaps there’s trouble, there’s anxiety, and you’re trying to hold it all together but it seems like it’s falling apart at the seams. Perhaps the state of the election, our country, our world has you knotted. There’s your vinegar. Go to God in prayer. Let your heart honestly bear your vinegar and find that God not only wants to take that, but also release the richness of His presence and assurance over you in your life.
Pour out, friend. And then?
Be filled.
