Good morning, Bridgetown Church. Welcome to the Bridgetown daily.

John Mark Comer here. It's Tuesday, April 7th, and it is a sunny, beautiful, warm spring

day in our city, even if we're looking at it from behind the wall of glass that is our

apartment window. I don't know about you, but I'm starting to feel a new kind of buoyancy

in my spirit, even up against all of the pain and the suffering of COVID-19, as I just

settle in to what God has for me and for our church in the season ahead. As you may know,

for Holy Week, we are running a kind of mini series on the Bridgetown daily on Contemplative

Prayer. Now, before we jump in, disclaimer, for you Contemplative Prayer people, I'm not

using Contemplative Prayer in the technical sense of the Jesus Prayer or Centering Prayer

or just breathing. Contemplative Prayer means different things to different people at different

periods in church history. I'm using it in the kind of very generous sense of the contemplative

for a type of prayer that is less about talking to God and more about listening to God,

less about noise and more about quiet, less about praying with other people and more

about praying alone in the morning or in the middle of the day or at night, less about

even changing the world with Jesus and more about accepting the world as it comes to us

with Jesus. And that's not because other types of prayer are bad at all. Do not misread

me. It's Tuesday. It's our day for prayer and fasting. I was up early at our morning

prayer gathering, praying for God to change the world and end COVID-19 and all of it.

But at some point in our prayer, we have to set all of our requests before God and then

let go and find a way to come to peace. Robert Mulholland, who's one of my favorite writers

and teachers on spiritual formation, writes about how early on in our prayer life, most

of our prayers, what he calls symptom management, it's just an attempt to get Jesus to alleviate

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