For some reason I have always had a hard time praying. Especially out loud. I am not talking about my prayers that ended in "and I promise I won't do it again." I use to be VERY good at those prayers:) I am taking steps to fix this "opportunity" of mine including volunteering to lead the prayer at our Church during communion or giving. That way I can have some time to plan what I am going to say.
I figure one I can handle the "planned prayer" then I can move on to the spontaneous out loud prayer. You know the one where someone asks "Will you lead us in prayer?" Right now I do not accept those "offers." In one class where we were sitting in a circle one of our Shepards started a "round robin" prayer. I quickly told him that I was going to "pass." The funny/nice thing was that I think it gave some other people the courage to do the same thing as one or two did so.
I am not advocating sitting in your comfort zone but I do think that people should not be forced or pressured to pray out loud if they do not feel comfortable doing so. Encouragement is another thing all together. The CFO and I have talked about this and she IS very encouraging. She reminds me that there is not necessarily a "right and wrong" way to pray but I do not want my prayer to take away from someone's experience at Church or any other gathering. I figure other people are better at it so let them handle it, for now.
The first hurdle in my quest of prayer is getting my head around (as much as we can as humans) that God is infinite and can hear ALL PRAYERS. I use to really have a hard time saying something other than "Thy will be done." I mean who am I to ask GOD for something? Not to mention that my prayers are but a speck of dust compared to the boulders that others are carrying, like praying for good weather for instance. Or how about the fact that we cannot know what is "good", only God does. What if God granted my prayer and it ended up being a bad thing? Think of what winning the lottery has done to some people! Also, where do you stop? Oops, forgot to pray for the orphans in this or that country or what about world peace or etc.... It also seemed a bit shallow to pray for yourself when others need so much, just watch the news. I have gotten better at this as my "crutch" is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26. Such an enabler:) But relying on that does not help others very much if you are the one leading the prayer, people expect words not groans from the Holy Spirit.
But as we know it is always a journey. Our destination will not be realized in this world unless we are here when Jesus returns.
Keep the faith,
Al
It is so hard to obey!
-
As you can imagine, we spend a lot of time talking to our kids about making
good choices. We talk about the fact that bad choices have consequences
and ho...
13 years ago
2 comments:
Praying outloud (or at all) has always been a struggle of mine. It's good to know that someone else out there is going through the same thing.
The key for me is I just use my public prayer time as an opportunity to praise God for all that He is and all that He does. My problem is when I pray several people will compliment me on my prayer and I think, I didn't do it for that purpose. So I usually say "no" because I don't want to draw attention to myself. Nice thing is your prayer is between you and God and He is pleased with whatever you do. It would be like one of the triplets talking to you in front of other people and you being embarrassed for them talking to you??? Like you, I still have a lot to learn about prayer.
Post a Comment