The Love Exchange

There’s more to prayer than petition. Most of us know this. But how good are we at cultivating the other elements of prayer? How persistent? How comfortable?

Twice lately, I’ve read of the importance of adoration in a daily time with God. The first source is Andrew Murray’s Deeper Christian Life. The second is Margaret Therkelsen’s Love Exchange: An Adventure in Prayer. It was published in 1990, and I read it back then; in recent weeks I’ve read it again. It’s not a scholarly book, but a personal one describing its author’s prayer journey and sharing one of her central practices.

The love exchange described here starts as a daily pattern: spend some time expressing your love for God, and then spend an equal amount of time affirming his love for you by faith through meditation on Scripture passages. “When we first begin this spiritual exercise it is shocking to see how little we love him,” Therkelsen warns. But keep at it. Love grows as it’s repeatedly affirmed, and so does our receptiveness to God’s love.

What starts as a daily practice becomes an avenue to what some have called holiness: a closer walk with God, a deeper flow of the Holy Spirit, a lifting of the self into God’s self-denying love for others, an increased sensitivity and power to intercede.

Margaret Therkelsen was my piano teacher in college. As a freshman I majored in music, and as a sophomore I continued to study piano with her. But even then she was in the midst of a change of direction, from piano performance to counseling and ministry in the area of prayer. As a visiting high school senior, I remember being deeply impressed as this tall, striking woman with such keen eyes and such a charismatic personality listened to me play. She taught me a lot at the keyboard, but it turned out that her main contribution to my life over the next few years wasn’t musical. I didn’t end up pursuing a career in music, but I did benefit from many conversations with her during those two rather turbulent years, conversations rich with wisdom and full of the assurance that God cared about me.

Reopening this book has brought her voice back to me in a poignant way. But it also challenges me and inspires me in my prayer life, particularly in the art of intercession. We may tend to think of intercessory prayer as exclusively verbal: someone expresses a need, someone else describes the need to God and asks him to do so-and-so. But intercession includes more than this, too — more work for the soul to do, and something other than advising God. How else could Daniel be in prayer for so long in the Old Testament? Or Elijah? Or [fill in name here]?

Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell brought up the idea of substitution — taking someone else’s worries or burdens off their shoulders, and carrying them in their stead. It was in a fictional setting, but this to me is a picture of intercession, and The Love Exchange suggests a similar vision. In John 14, Jesus says that whatever we ask in his name we will receive, but what does it mean to ask “in his name”? This book got me thinking about how crucial it is to abide in, and to intercede from within, his love — ours for him, his for us, his for the world and for the person for whom we pray. This is one result as we mature in our grasp of “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God.”

I appreciated this book because it gave me a glimpse of the vistas of prayer that remain to be discovered. I’m not very far along the path, but this book sheds some light on the territories ahead.