Salmon Siesta
I just wanted to let you know that I will be writing less this week, perhaps not at all.
I’ll be back in due time, I promise.
If I lurk on your site, I might continue to do so, so keep writing good things. I’ll need good things to read over the next few days.
Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. If a discussion of some sort breaks out, I might even pop back in to contribute. Heck, I’ll even give you a topic, one that my friend Shanna brought up last week:
What’s the deal with prayer? Why do we do it? Does it actually do anything?
I’ll try to take these questions on eventually, but I know some of y’all have thoughts on this that would put mine to shame. So have at it. Make me proud.
Also, if your answer to that last question is yes, we wouldn’t mind a little prayer sent our way this week.
Thanks.
2 Ripples from “Salmon Siesta”
Kevin says:
October 10, 2005 at 6:10 pm
A good question. I dunno. I guess the easy answer is that Jesus prayed and he told us to do so, too. That said, it seems a little odd that we should ask God for things that he already knows we need and that other people need. Maybe there’s a psychological aspect to prayer, that it molds and refines us to think more like Christ. Then again, people probably tend to hear their own voices when they pray far more often than God’s. But I know of people who have been physically healed after being prayed over (musician Larry Norman for instance, who had rather severe brain damage for several years until a man prayed over him). So there’s that.
Shanna says:
October 11, 2005 at 7:11 am
A pastor on Sunday, in her message to the children, compared praying to a “worry stone”. She passed out small worry stones to the children, and proceeded to show them bigger and bigger stones for bigger and bigger worries, telling them that God has a “basket” for their biggest worry stones. In case you aren’t familiar with what they are (I wasn’t), it’s similar to one of those squishy stress balls, you sort of use it as a methodical motion to calm and center yourself, preparing you to do what you must. That metaphor seems much closer to truth to me than the cultural idea of prayer that we have that is similar to a letter to Santa Claus.
I also heard a speaker at a UCC conference talk about prayer as a way of sharing your burden with your community and your universe, though this idea was more an answer to “Why public prayer?”.
As someone who doesn’t feel called to the idea of an interventionist God, I do feel certain that people like me are still supposed to grapple with the idea of prayer. I think the two metaphors above are ideas that can and do call to us.
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