Pathways Press.com

Written by Skye Jethani, a contemporary author, speaker, and pastor. This is an excerpt from his book “What if Jesus Was Serious about Prayer?”

Many don’t know that when Vincent van Gogh was a young man he served as a missionary among coal miners in Belgium. The experience left him with a deep admiration for the working poor. They did not understand deep theology, and most did not practice acceptable forms of piety, but they possessed God with a raw authenticity very different from the stiff religiosity van Gogh had known since his childhood. Vincent produced a charcoal drawing in 1882 that captures his esteem for the coal miners he served. It features an elderly man in a chair near a fire with his face buried in his hard, peasant hands. The reason for the man’s posture isn’t immediately clear. He could be crying or exhausted, but van Gogh revealed the truth with the drawing title—At Eternity’s Gate. It’s a portrait of a peasant in prayer. In a letter Vincent wrote, “This is far from theology, simply the fact that the poorest little woodcutter or peasant on the hearth or miner can have moments of emotion and inspiration which give him a feeling of an eternal home to which he is near.  Van Gogh understood that powerful prayer is available to the ordinary, simple, and even the ignorant. It is for children and peasants, not just the pastors or the powerful. Sometimes we are impressed with those who pray with eloquence or who weave deep theology and Scripture into their petitions to God, and yet the prayer of an unschooled woodcutter asking his heavenly Father for his daily bread can possess the faith to bridge earth and eternity.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God [John 1:12]