What do you pray for in your wildest of prayers?
That’s probably a question you’ve never been asked. Neither have I! But something about it makes me curious about my own prayer life. What are the things I pray for? Am I praying for the wild things I truly want to see happen? Or am I praying for the things I think are most likely to happen?
You see, I’ve been reading this book called Praying like Monks, Living like Fools by Tyler Staton, and in the first chapter, I found an immediate challenge to the way I pray.
Tyler points out that one of the reasons we should pray is because we’re overwhelmed. DUH! But he goes on to describe a subtle change many people experience, including me. When we get stuck in cycles of being overwhelmed by the things around us, we lose our ability to see beyond them. Our hopes shrink from longing for freedom to just waiting for the next five-minute break.
Like that time your day was so packed with things to do and places to go that, around five o’clock, you raced to the grocery store just so you could spend five or ten minutes sitting in the parking lot, scrolling on your phone before pulling your tired self out of the car to finish the day . . . No? Just me?
What we might notice even less is how this affects our prayer life. Tyler didn’t pull any punches when he wrote this:
“Constantly overwhelmed lives should drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but the tendency for many of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom.”
If I’m only praying for small things to get an easy yes from God, how am I growing in faith and trust? How am I growing in my relationship with God?
Instead, I want that first question to lead me. I want to give God my biggest hopes—the ones I could never bring about on my own, the ones I need God’s help with most.
Many of those prayers are for this church and community. I’m praying for God to fill the room with people who are curious about faith for the first time. I’m praying for people in our community who have been hurt by church to find connection again with a group of believers, whatever shape that community takes. I’m praying that God gives our church the strength and courage to stand for and with people on the margins of society and the church. I’m praying that everyone who encounters KUMC will experience the love of God.
So…
What do you pray for in your wildest of prayers?
From the heart,
Rev. Steph Margeson
