Prayer - Super glue or Sinex?
Today's thoughts arose from an American headline from last week claiming that "God was not fixing this". It was written in response to a call for more prayer following shootings in California and yet I couldn't help but think that it was built on a false understanding of what prayer is.
Let me illustrate:
Regularly the boys will come in to the study and dump something on my desk with the declaration "need's fixing". No sooner is the broken item deposited than they are out of the room with something else on their agenda. And this is fine, the boys are far too young to be let loose with superglue (perish the thought) and so it is left to me to fix the said item. Yet this so often seems to be our approach to prayer - when Facebook declares #prayforparis or twitter #prayforsyria there appears to be an expectation that we can leave it to God.
The trouble is we are old enough to use superglue, we are old enough to use the ballot box and we are certainly old enough to use words wisely.
So let me illustrate it another way:
If we have a blocked nose we use Sinex to clear it, or paracetamol to clear a headache or in my case eczema cream to clear my eczema (funnily enough). The trouble is that I forget - all the time, and so I still have an elbow that constantly looks like I have fallen off my bike and dragged it along the tarmac. The thing is, I don't blame the doctor for this, its not her fault that I'm useless and failing to comply with some quite simple instructions on how to make my world a slightly better place.
So why do we blame God when we are old enough and ugly enough to join him in changing the world. The day will come when I will sit down with the boys and help them to apply the superglue and that is what God wants. When we ask him to fix the world he ask us to love differently, when we pray for peace he asks us to make peace a reality where we are, at home, at work, on the road and, yes, even in church.
So do we take a Super Glue or Sinex approach to prayer? Do we dump things on his desk and expect him to go away and make it better or do we join him, swallowing the pill he has prescribed, being part of the solution rather than blaming him for not fixing it?
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