Have you noticed?

“Thoughts and prayers” are getting a bad rap these days. Some might say, “deservedly so.”

The meme here on the right is one example of that disdain. I could include dozens of others including the cartoon showing a guy kneeling on a dock yelling, “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS!!” to a drowning man just feet away from him.

It seems every crisis – global or local – is accompanied by outpourings of both “thoughts and prayers” and derision of those very thoughts and prayers.

But is that fair? Or even warranted?

“Thoughts” I get. Me thinking about families destroyed by gun violence, or addiction, or poverty, or tsunamis, or war is a useless, fleeting, and empty gesture. I think about them for a moment and then I am off to pondering today’s grocery list or the haircut I need to schedule. 

Prayers – as I understand prayers – are another animal entirely. 

I believe a prayer is an attempt by a flawed, limited, natural being to forge a connection with a perfect, infinite, supernatural Being. It is not – as some would like to posit – an abandonment of practical action. Rather it is the act of enlisting resources beyond the realm of the known. 

When I pray, I don’t see myself as lobbing a desperate “Hail Mary” pass into the ether, hoping it might land. When I pray I am, in effect, saying, “Besides all the actions I am taking on behalf of the injured parties here on this plane of existence, I am holding open the very real possibility that aid may also come from a source beyond this plane.” 

In other words, I see prayer as a “both/and” rather than an “either/or.”

What leads me to that understanding you ask? And I answer, “Experience.” I have personally experienced relief I can only describe as mystical in times when I have been in personal crisis. At many of those times when I have prayed for myself or asked people to pray for me, something unexplainable has happened. I have felt either a sudden enveloping sense of peace and well-being or have experienced an unforeseen life preserver suddenly splashing down beside me. 

Does that happen every time? No. It doesn’t. 

But it does happen often enough that I always want to be sure to include this tool in my arsenal when the hard times come… whether they come for me or for you. 

In my life, prayer also serves as a sort of “action before the action” device. Presented with a knotty, seemingly insoluble problem – say world hunger, or how best to intercede for a geographically distant loved one – prayer is a way to summon better insights than my puny three pounds of grey matter can offer. 

In his timeless advice to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul reminds the folks there to, “Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer.” (Romans 12:12, NRSVU). None of which, to my way of thinking, includes an instruction to sit passively on one’s haunches waiting for something magical to happen.

In closing I will just come out and ask: how can I pray for YOU today?

Abundant blessings;