I haven’t been feeling very prayerful lately. The running conversation with God that makes up my informal prayer life is full of grumbling.

There are hundreds of things large and small for me to be thankful for, and I do know enough to put myself in an attitude of thanksgiving and remember them. When I settle myself down to pray, I have no trouble finding a list of them to run through, and I don’t minimize the importance of that.

But just now there are a couple of sizeable issues in my life that are distressing, and several of those average pebble-in-my-shoe, “What am I going to do?” topics that are distracting me. Instead of singing, “How can I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?” I find myself grousing, “Could you give me a break here?”

Pessimism is my natural state of mind, although I struggle against it. I’ve read that pessimists make more accurate assessments of what’s going on around them, but optimists have a lot more fun along the way. So I try to see that the glass is half-full. But God already knows I’m a pessimist, so I can admit my fears and worries to him. I know he’s not going to decide I’m too negative to hang out with. Nevertheless, as surely as I know God wants me to be honest with him, part of me thinks he’s going to get tired of my constant complaining.

Much of my self-inflicted aggravation comes from not living in the moment, from worrying about what’s going to happen next. That covers everything from whether I’m going to find a parking spot to whether my retirement fund will ever be adequate. Telling myself that most people in the world don’t have cars or savings accounts is somehow not comforting. I’m sometimes knocked back on my heels by the magnitude of the differences between my life and the lives of the poor, but I never find that comforting—just sad, like the rich young man in the gospel.

I could, I suppose, cultivate detachment from the things of this world. I’m too attached to having things go according to my plan, and so I fret that they may not. I want things to fit my design, and I grumble when they don’t. I want my body to work as well as it did twenty years ago, and I grouse about my arthritic knees. Very few of the things that trouble me are important in an objective sense. Most are things over which I have little or no control.

It’s probably better for me to grumble at God than at the people around me (although I wonder how many of them think of me as a grumbler). It would probably be good discipline to work on grumbling less, though, and at least think about being optimistic. And it wouldn’t kill me to send God fewer petitions and more praise, and trust that he’ll give me all I need. But I suspect the prescription sounds easier than it may be to follow. We’ll see.