The other day I found myself wondering about Jesus and his relationship with his Father.
On numerous occasions, the Gospels tell us he would slip away from the crowds, stepping off into the lonely hills to “pray.” But stripped of the solemnity we usually attach, he was simply going off to talk to his Dad.
The only fully documented prayer we have from him is at the end, cried out from the cross, but that feels more like an anguish-filled surrender than a conversation. Circumstances were hardly ideal. I find myself wondering instead about all those unrecorded talks along the dusty roads of Galilee.
Early on in his journey, did he sit under the shade of an olive tree and talk over his choices for followers? Did he tell his Father about Peter’s temper, John’s intensity, or the awkward enthusiasm of the others? Did he mention meeting Mary, asking his Father what he thought of her? Just normal, everyday conversation. More than anything, I wonder if it was a true, comfortable, Father-and-Son dialogue. My own father didn’t say much. And from all we can tell, God usually favors silence as well. I wonder if things were different when it was just the two of them.
Such wonderings are, of course, pure speculation. Yet I suspect God doesn’t mind our imagination if it brings us closer to Him. Perhaps He wants us to think of him not as a distant monarch demanding protocol, but as a Father sitting on the back porch, waiting for his child to wander up and talk. He is a good listener. Most fathers are, if we give them the chance.
We often treat silence as absence or distance. But between a father and a son who know each other completely, silence isn’t a wall—it is a shared space. A young man sitting beside a quiet father doesn’t always need a flood of words to feel known. Sometimes the presence itself is the conversation.
If Jesus went off into the hills, perhaps he wasn’t always looking for instructions or heavy theological truths. Perhaps he went simply to sit in the comfort of being fully understood without having to explain himself to a world that rarely grasped who he was. In that quiet solitude, the son rested in the father’s presence, and the father delighted in the son.
Praying doesn’t have to be a performance, a ritual, or a list of formal petitions. It can simply be the quiet reporting of our lives—our friends, our doubts, the people we met along the way—to a Father who already knows, but loves to hear us tell it anyway. The miracle of prayer may not be that God speaks back in a loud voice, but that in the quiet space between our thoughts, we are never alone.
Lovely— really! You think beautiful thoughts!
Thank You!