Guy Sebastian's Guilty Prayer

Australian singer, Guy Sebastian, is rightly famous for winning the first season of Australian Idol back in 2003, and then going on to have a stellar career with ten albums totalling seven million sales and nearly two billion streams on Spotify so far. He is, some two and a bit decades later, still the most successful by far.

His music is not my cup of tea, though I recognise how gifted he is. He is somewhat redeemed in my eyes by also being a better than average cricketer with a top score of 153 not out in a grade game – made well after he was already famous. A beast with the willow and with the microphone.

But it was this article about Guy in The Sydney Morning Herald in which he and his wife talk about the legal wrangle he found himself in when his former manager was charged with stealing a truckload of his money that caught my eye. It’s a pretty raw account of what happened.

And it starts this way:

When Guy Sebastian found himself sobbing in a toilet cubicle of a NSW courtroom – where he was giving evidence against his former manager and friend, Titus Day – he began to pray. “Then I felt guilty,” says the musician as his wife, Jules, gently places her hand on his arm. “It was like, ‘Ah, I’ll just say a prayer when the S*&% hits the fan.’ I haven’t prayed for so long [and now I’m] just asking for help when things are rubbish.”

Guy has gotten stick down the years for having abandoned his faith when he got famous. He was pretty churchy back in the day, as were many of the Idol singers who had cut their teeth on stages in the megachurches across the country.

There were puff pieces on his faith in all the women’s mags, and for a while it was kinda cool again to be churchy and then that faded (though here we are again. Go figure!)

A bunch of us felt a little discomfited that Guy began to distance himself from his faith as he became more famous. And not out of anger, but more out of concern, given there’s a parable by Jesus in there somewhere, something about soil and seed and weeds.

But, leaving that aside, Guy’s instinct to pray when things got tough is totally right.

Yet his guilt is not.

Why do I say that? Because we all recognise Guy’s dilemma. We’ve all been on that sliding scale of prayerlessness. And then suddenly things are rubbish and we find ourselves praying and we’re thinking in that self-loathing way, “How lame am I? I’m just asking God for help cos I’m out of my depth and in a bind!”

Have you not been there? I know I have. I well remember as an early 20-something having train wrecked a couple of years of my life, standing in the shower one morning and saying:

“Okay Lord, I’m going to get up every day and live life for you this time. And every day I’m going to ask you to help me.”

Results? Good at times. Sketchy at other times. Very, very good when I was diagnosed with a terrible illness. Not so good when life was frustrating me and I wasn’t getting what I wanted (and I was pretty sure God didn’t want me to get what I wanted either, which invariably turned out to be a good thing looking back on it). But here’s my takeaway:

Don’t let your guilt for not praying keep you from praying!

Our Heavenly Father loves to hear our prayers and isn’t standing with folded arms, tapping his foot in annoyance and asking “So, now that you’re in trouble you turn up. Is that right?”

That’s actually what WE would be like, but not God. By contrast Jesus presents his Father as one who loves to give good gifts to his children, even his wayward children. And God loves us to pray.

I recently interviewed former Ridley College Principal, and one time rector of St Jude’s in Carlton, Melbourne, Peter Adam, about his wonderful new book on prayer, Prayerfulness: Cultivating a Bible-enriched prayer life. I highly recommend it.

Right at the start of it, he says this, and it moves my heart:

God likes talking and God likes listening. God likes talking to us, and God likes hearing from us when we talk to him. God talks to us when we read his word, The Bible. And God listens to us when we pray – that is, when we talk to him. God likes talking to us and listening to us, because God like us, and because he has made us to relate to him (and to each other) by words.

God likes us and likes hearing from us. Perhaps when you’re at the stage Guy Sebastian is, ostensibly far from God, it’s easy to think that God is far from you.

But we know he is close to each one of us. He was there with Guy in that toilet cubicle in a New South Wales court house, as an earthly judge determined whether he was being ripped off or not.

So whether it’s a toilet cubicle, or a virtual pig pen in a faraway land, or even that office you’re sitting in, or that kitchen window you’re staring through wondering just why the fan has been hit by the excrement so many times, God still wants to hear from you! Amazing, but true.

And more than that, he is wherever you are at the moment. That is how God is because that is who God is. If a cross is not too low for God to turn up at, then you slumped over the bowl sobbing your heart out isn’t too low for him either.

And as we know, God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain. CS Lewis reminds us of this. Perhaps Guy’s pain is God’s way of drawing him back to Himself. One can never tell.

And perhaps that’s true of you today too. You haven’t prayed for so long, and now here you are asking for help when things are rubbish. And in God’s economy, that’s totally okay, as this famous prayer from Hannah in 1 Samuel 2 reminds us:

“The Lord brings death and makes alive;
he brings down to the grave and raises up.
The Lord sends poverty and wealth;
he humbles and he exalts.

He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
and has them inherit a throne of honour.

Or to put it rather more cheekily, the one who left the throne of heaven, isn’t ashamed to be with you as weep beside the porcelain throne. Angels might not have brought you here (let the reader understand), but God may well have done. And he can raise you back up again. You only have to ask him. Guilt free.