Seven-Day Practical Faith Blog: My Festivus Prayer

I realized recently how often I pray to God in the manner of Festivus.

Odd statement, I know. Festivus is a sardonic, alternate celebration during the Christmas season, popularized on the TV show Seinfeld and based on real-life events in the family of a show writer.

Festivus has three unusual features:

1. It is celebrated with an unadorned pole rather than a Christmas tree, as pictured. (Photo credit to Celeste Lindell; photo shared on Flickr based on CC BY 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic, found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

2. Its main event is the Airing of Grievances, in other words, telling what you didn't like about the last year and getting personal as necessary.

3. This is followed by Feats of Strength, wrestling matches that end when the host is pinned.

What does any of this have to do with prayer?

Sometimes my prayer to God is unadorned. Not decorated at all. Raw. Unfiltered.

In that Festivus-style prayer, I air my grievances - direct complaints to or even about God. Again, unfiltered. Letting out my complaints and the issues I have.

Feats of strength remind me of Jacob wrestling with God, as described in Genesis 32:22-32. As the Got Questions website says, "Jacob was a con artist who had been conned, a liar who had been lied to, and a manipulator who had been manipulated." In this passage, Jacob was on the eve of meeting his brother Esau, whom he had cheated out of their father Isaac's inheritance.

Jacob experienced a troubled night during which he wrestled with a man whom he suspected to be God. Genesis 32:25-28 (NIV) indicates the result of wrestling.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Frederick Buechner characterized Jacob’s divine encounter as the “magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”

Have you ever spent a dark night of the soul wrestling with God? How has that gone? When we air our grievances, we may wind up wrestling with God. But unlike the Festivus Feats of Strength, we will never pin the Lord of Hosts. We will come away "defeated," but we also come away blessed, as Jacob did.

I'm not saying Festivus Prayer is always the best pattern for approaching Almighty God. But it's real. God can handle our rawness, our anger, our fear, our frustration, our willfulness. God is willing to participate in the wrestling match. And at the end, like Jacob, we continue on our daily faith journey, richer and blessed for the experience.

Speaking of your daily faith journey, I have a free gift to help you strategize your approach. It's called the Practical Faith Game Plan, containing a structure and implementation ideas. Download it from the pop-up or from the registration box, both on my home page at CecilTaylorMinistries dot com.