Double~take | prayer
prayers to a dead-end voicemail
T
his week I managed to call the voicemail of a phone that we’ve had difficulty in accessing. After sitting through 18 new messages (dating from June), I finally got to the call I had just missed. The message bank was full.
It’s the situation I envisage myself in over the next couple of weeks. Did you know that after flushing your cellphone down the toilet, it still takes a bit for the water to completely destroy it? I tried calling my phone, and waited through 15 rings till I hit voicemail. Now my phone no longer rings - and I have no idea how to access any messages which people may leave. R.I.P. phone.
I theorized that this can be like prayer. I know there are a heap of verses that speak of God not listening to our prayers if there is unresolved sin in our life, and not hearing rote prayers when people think he will answer them because of their many words.
As a child, I remember many pledges, promises and prayers that I had to recite on a regular basis. Did they just end up in a dead-end voicemail? It did cross my mind as to how separate words and reality were, especially when you consider lines like:
I promise that I will try…
…To offer a prayer morning and evening…
…which I recited weekly for three years before I even became a Christian, and for a while afterwards - with no daily prayers in sight. It makes you wonder what the point is of saying the words at all.
From The Year of Living Biblically:
A.J. spends a year living the bible - literally. This includes praying - which he commits to do three times a day. This poses a big problem for him as a secular agnostic, so he recites biblical prayers. But on day 237, his young son whacks his head against a door frame…
It’s a horrible moment - and also a milestone of sorts. My first reaction, as I was running to show Julie [his wife], was to pray to God for Jasper to be OK. It was like reflex praying. Unplanned, unforced.
There’s a quote: “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes the one who prays”. And ironically, after so many years, those rote prayers I learned as a child are popping up in my prayers now. Even the optional ones I only studied to pass membership tests. It’s as though, after all those prayers to a supposedly dead-end voicemail box, I found the access password - only to discover that the backlog of prayers had not changed God, but had been shaping me.
Double~take appears every Saturday on theRubicon. Find past Double~take posts and a bio of Stephanie Hung here.
1 Comment to Double~take | prayer
Leave a comment
Categories
- 1000 Post Celebration
- Areopagus
- Belief
- Blogroll
- COMING SOON
- Concise Oxford
- Creation
- Creative Arts
- Double~take
- Easter
- Ecclesia
- Education
- Ephemera
- FAD
- Featured
- From Russia with Blogs
- Gen whY?
- History
- JustThinking
- Lives lived
- Match factory
- Match Factory Events
- Ordination
- Personae
- Politics
- Power
- Ragamuffin
- Ramblings
- Redux - The Best of
- Resources
- Resurrected writers
- Reviews
- Rubicon Books
- Rubiconography
- Shades of grey
- Shades of grey
- Supper Club
- theRubi-Blog
- Think
- Thinkaloud
- Thought
- Uncategorized
- Urbanities
- Vox populi
Sound and Fury
- Slaves 5 Margaret Okubo, David, Johnny Gainey
- What The Hell? (Part One: Bell's Hell) 12 Jim, Jim, Robert deidrick
- Politics #1 : Political parties - An Erroneous Assumption 4 Rochelle Stockman, Terry Camsey, Phil
- Murungu or Mwanangu 5 George, givesak, Andrea614Regent
- Heaven without hell 24 Mary Davis, Cadet Nathan Swartz, Andrew Bale
A very dear freind, brother in Christ and Salvation Army Major calls Jer: 33:3 “the worlds most important telephone number.” Analyse it:-Call to me and I will answer you:- no 1 to 10 numbers for this or that service, oh no, you get right to the CEO, Chairan of the Board, the Alpha & Omega, our creator FIRST CALL. “and tell you great and unsearchable things” what an opener! AND ” you do not know.” Yes things we do not know ALWAYS! And always an answer, even though we wordly wise people some times fail to miss the answer.