Category:

Praying for physical and emotional healing

3/14/2023

Thank you for your prayers for my friend. All went well, although there is pain, and a long road to independence ahead for her. It was easy to pray for her healing and for the things to go well with surgeon and nursing staff. Praying for physical healing is just that. Of course, a prayer for things notto go well would be no prayer at all!
So what about prayers for mental healing? Like me, I'm sure you have people on your prayer list who are lost and suffering emotionally. Other than wanting them to be released from that pain, what do we pray for? How specific might we be? My prayer for them is less about specifics, and more about lifting them to the light and 'letting go and letting God." In the weeks and months to come, I will be including that kind of prayer for my friend.

My on-going prayer challenge

11/17/2022

There is a great deal to say about prayer; there is very little to say about prayer. Both are true!
   Sometimes when I start writing for this blog, I tell myself, “Oh, come on, you’ve said that before. They know that!”
   So why do I even continue? Why not add to ‘daily quotes’ and ‘word & image’ and leave it at that? Because, I’m still pondering this God mystery, this prayer mystery. I say the Jesus Prayer; I accept that prayer makes a difference, that God loves everyone, that my life is grace-filled, that our faith deepens when we read and ponder scripture, that I am called to pray for people….
   But all those come from my mind. The prayer challenge is for them to move to my heart, which is where prayer is, where God is, where love resides and where it can rise for others to feel.

Praying for those estranged

11/12/2022

My prayer book contains several categories: friends and family, groups that I’m connected with (i.e. church), those grieving, those struggling with addiction… There is also has a category for people estranged from one other, which usually means family members. It is a list filled with sadness. Usually I don’t tell friends that I praying for their loved one, for them, or for the situation. For the efficiency of the prayer, they don’t need to know.
But sometimes I tell that I am praying for their ‘lost’ loved one, which is what I did recently. My friend’s response, “Oh, I’m so glad someone is praying for him.” My friend is alone and so is her estranged grown child. I’m praying for them both, heart to heart, no judgment, just love.

Prayer cues

6/11/2022

I haven’t posted in the last few weeks but I have been praying, which seems like the most satisfying, comforting and hopeful thing I can do these days. I start the day with good intentions but then life happens and I get distracted. But then, I get called back. It has to be God doing the calling because I know I’m too self-involved to take much credit. And yet, I do believe that God is giving me a say in this prayer life of mine; God does not have robots! Rather I (all of us) am called to co-create with God.
I have my cues (I’d use the word triggers except I’m trying to stay away from war metaphors) to help me remember God; my meditation time which has become hardwired into my life; my little post-it prayer list that I write each day; the Jesus prayer that arises from my subconscious; and my daily walk.
What signals do you have in your life to remind you to pray and lift yourself from worry and despair that arises when you think human kind, including yourself, is running the show?

Praying scripture

4/5/2022

Peter Paul Rubens

Lectio Divina is a popular, traditional way to study scripture. A Google search offer the following:

Traditionally, Lectio Divina has four separate steps: read; meditate; pray; contemplate. First a passage of scripture is read, then its meaning is reflected upon. This is followed by prayer and contemplation on the Word of God.

This process, which is laborious, time consuming, and intellectual, usually doesn’t fulfill my needs. When I go through the process I might feel ready to write paper for a divinity class, but I don’t feel prayerful, more loving, or closer to God, which is what I desire.
Here is another, and clearly a simpler way to pray scripture, offered by the student minister at church on Sunday.

Read a scripture.
Ask where you see God in it.
Ask where you see yourself in it.

That’s it. Give it a try.

Praying to let go of fear

2/23/2019

I’m back again, grappling with the news. What am I grappling with? Fear.
    Fear, the title of Bob Woodward’s recent book, sums up whose fear I’m talking about. Everyone’s! Trump’s and all his allies; me and all who are of my persuasion.
    I know that I can only manage my own fear, but how can I do that when I hear of hate talk that includes guns?
      “It’s all about guns, stupid,” I tell myself. But does that mean I get a gun, fight fire with fire, fight guns with guns?
     No! As a Christian, I know better than that.
     Thankfully, after acknowledging my fear, God appears and I hear, “It’s all about love, stupid.”
     I pray that I can pray for my enemies, which means praying that love enters everyone. Everyone includes those with guns, and people like me, who aren’t violent in physical ways, but who are violent in their judgments and in their anger of those who doesn’t agree with us.

Prayer matters

9/29/2018

I’ve posted the following on my acottagebythesea blog. I want to add here that these two men have reminded me to pray for situations that seem so fraught with negativity and hopelessness.

      One of my takeaways from the Supreme Court hearings this week has been the relationship between Senators and Coons and Flake. Here are two men from opposite sides of the aisle and with differing political views coming together because of their faith, demonstrating that their faith guides what they say and do. Each has a deep moral compass.
     Embedded in his public comments before the committee vote yesterday, Coons shared that the evening before he specifically prayed for both Cavanaugh and Ford, and for the country, and that he would do so again this evening. In admitting this publicly, it is clear that prayer isn’t a throw away for him. Rather, it is central to how he leads his life, both personally and as a senator. His comments were palpable.
     In the past week Senator Flake’s words and actions indicated that his faith guides what he does and says. His speech September 26th on the Senate floor offered compassion and civility for everyone involved and for our country. Yesterday, standing in the private elevator for senators, he listened to the impassioned women who caught his attention; he looked them in the eye; he didn’t shut the door on them.
     The comity between these two men gives me hope. Comity, a new word entering public discourse: 1. an association of nations for their mutual benefits; 2. courtesy and considerate behavior toward others (Google search). I believe that comity happens when we give up acting out of ego, out of believing we have all the answers, out of thinking we are God.

Praying for caregivers

6/13/2018

Sometimes I pray with the people I visit. “What shall we pray for?” I ask, and I am in awe of what comes forth. Today, at the rehab facility, Martha wanted to pray for her caregivers. Here she was, sitting in her wheelchair, putting aside her long-term struggles and expressing compassion for the dedicated help she had been receiving for close to seven months.
Visiting always presents an opportunity for me to receive as well as give. I don’t want to say that I receive more than I give, although that often feels like the case, because I don’t consider giving and receiving as competitive, or as one being better than the other. I am committed to experiencing them as part of the same seamless cloth, perhaps a beautiful prayer shawl.

Praying for decisions

6/10/2018

     Childhood memories about praying can give us a window into how we learned to pray. I saw my parents praying every Sunday at church. Occasionally they talked about prayer with me. When I was thirteen I recall my father’s precise words as I considered which friend to invited to come with us on a trip to Canada.
     “You might consider praying about it.”
     I remember talking to God about it, and after a couple of days telling Dad my decision. The answer was right; we had a wonderful early teen time.
That’s pretty much the way I pray for decisions now, sixty years later. Pose a questions; talk with God; listen for an answer; stick with the decision and be happy with it. I pray mind, body, spirit, all mixed together.

Mind; an idea; thinking about a problem, chatting with God about it.
Body: the physical experience; we live in the body.
Spirit: a peaceful response; loving.

Speaking before writing

5/25/2018

    As I continue to consider writing about prayer, it occurs to me that a preliminary step is talking about it. In the writing process world it is deemed a form of pre-writing.
     My friends know that I’m a prayer person, although I don’t know how that has come about since I’m not explicit about it in our conversations. Maybe just in saying that I love my church conveys enough. In obvious and subtle ways friends seem comforted just knowing I’m a prayer person. Even if they can’t proclaim belief, they are consoled and reassured by someone who does. You don’t have to believe in miracles to want one.
     “We teach who we are,” Parker J. Palmer proclaims. We teach in the arena of life, not just in the classroom.