Our Prayerful Requests

 

 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.  

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

                                      Matthew 7:5-6 NRSVue

I was going through one of the suits I rarely have occasion to wear anymore and in one of the pockets I found this note with a prayer request. It is about a seven-year-old with cancer, a terrible reality for any child and loved ones. I have obscured the name of the child and of the person requesting the prayer but I honestly don't recall who the latter was. I vaguelyt recall that the child was not a part of the congregation I served but the request was made out of love.

Finding this note touched me because it was a reminder of all the requests for prayer over the years for so many different circumstances, many of them dire. I often wondered what to pray and felt a strange sense of responsibility to bend God's ear, even though I was just one person of sometimes shaky faith . Did any of these persons figure I had an "in" with God that they didn't have? I have often felt disappointment and even failure in prayer, for others and myself, yet I persist. I didn't want to be a hypocrite because Jesus makes it clear often in the Sermon on the Mount that he didn't have patience for phonies.I just can't give it up. I suppose I'm more like the desperate father who brings his ailing son to Jesus and admits,  “I believe; help my unbelief!” 

 The gospels tell us that Jesus prayed and he encouraged his followers to do so as well. He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was arrested and crucified, and he wanted a different outcome. 

I hope that the child who was the subject of this note is now a teenager -- given the age of the suit, that would be about right. I may not have been sure what to pray at the time but it was important that the writer shared this burden with others and chose the possibilities of prayer in the midst of uncertainty.