FaithPrayers International Prayer Line
FaithPrayers International Prayer Line | It is our privilege to pray for you
Jesus said that, and in their own ways many great thinkers have also said it. But to me, the fact that Jesus said it so clearly makes it carry special meaning.
I wonder if we could also say:
“Pray about others as you would have others pray about you.”
What would that mean?
When we pray for ourselves we often pray about a need we have, a problem, or a concern. We pray about sickness, we pray when the money isn’t stretching far enough, and for our relationships and jobs. Those are all very legitimate and needed things to pray about. It makes great sense to talk to God about all the aspects that comprise our lives.
I wonder, though, if it would change something for us if we began to pray in great earnest about our personalities, about our character, about what – in our society – we tend to term “that’s just me”.
When someone is sick or the mortgage is about to fail, we crumble out of bed onto our knees and beg God to hear and answer. What would it mean to us, as people, if one day we awoke, fell to the side of the bed, and began begging God to be, for instance, a kinder person?
African-American Spiritual
Author unknown
There is an old spiritual, barely sung anymore, that captures the essence of a heart’s cry to God. “It’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”
Me. What a hard word, sometimes, to say. To admit.
Many people are in need of prayer — and that is certainly at the heart of the mission of FaithPrayers. But at the end of the day, one thing stands out clearly: we all need prayer. And, we all need to pray.
Sometimes those in the helping professions — the nurses, teachers, therapists, etc. — find, at the end of a day of giving to others, that “It’s me, O Lord, who is standing in the need of prayer.” But not only because they have given so much, which they may have done, but simply because we all do need prayer. It’s not only when we have given, or when crisis strikes, that we need prayer. We need great prayer on the day when things are the most right, when things are the best they have ever been. Because we always need both to pray and have others praying for us.
The above quote hung on my mother’s refrigerator for a long time. I kept reading it, over and over as we would make meals, clean up, or when I would stop in to do laundry and raid the refrigerator for a sandwich — until finally, one day, I asked her if I could have it. She smiled, and nodded her head. “You sure can,” was her only reply, as she took it down from the front of her refrigerator and handed it to me.
It found its new home on my own refrigerator door, the paper already partly torn and old. By the time it had to be replaced with a freshly typed version, the old green piece of paper was nearly disintegrating. But not one word of the message had been torn or was unreadable, even then.
When a person has never prayed, it can seem a bit daunting at first to do so. And yet, for most of us whatever our background, in an hour of need we find ourselves almost instinctively crying out to the Being we somehow know is out there… someplace. This has been true through millennia.
As the author C.S. Lewis once mentioned: we cry out for food when we are hungry, and such a thing as food exists. It seems most likely that we cry out to God because such a Being exists. Unless the majority of our ancestors from every ethnicity, race and culture around this globe were wrong, we might want to consider why, through the ages, they continued to cry out to the heavens. They cried out to the One who made them because the cry came, inherently, from the depths of their being. They knew to call out, even if they differed on the particulars about that Being.
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