Who is My Prayer For Anyway?
I happened to have a meeting this past week with the Episcopal Church’s Bishop of Northern Ohio (www.dohio.org) Mark Hollingsworth to discuss the Capital Campaign our church is doing. I and three fellow members reviewed with him our case elements, attendance figures, pledge rates and other facts and figures pertinent to raising a million dollars.
Finally at one point he asked us, “What Can I Do to Help?” So one of our responses was to pray for us, of course he said he would but then he added, “You know when you pray for others you are really praying for yourself.” This question, at the time kind of floated by all of us without much comment but ever since has been stuck in my brain and won’t go away.
On the way home a friend I rode with to the meeting and I actually brought up that comment and started to talk about it. My friend said of course when we pray for others it is for ourselves, what do you think God keeps a score sheet and whomever gets prayed for the most is paid attention to? Isn’t the hungry child we don’t know as valuable to God as the one we do know and pray for?
Is My Prayer for Others Just a Prayer for Me?
I can answer yes because it does make me feel better to have asked God to help others. Of course I pray directly for myself and my needs. I guess in both cases it reflects to me that I do believe in God and that I believe my prayer matters.
Maybe prayer for others is really just the first awareness of the things that we should be taking action upon and not just pray for. If I pray for the hungry what am I doing to feed them, if I pray for equal justice what am I doing to bring it about and so on.
What this really means and maybe why some people don’t pray much (even Christians) is that prayer is us surfacing to ourselves those things that we need to pay attention to in our life and is God’s way of making us do so.
So resisting prayer may really be a way of hiding.
Interesting…
