Providence Presbyterian Church - Powdersville SC

“O Lord, in Whom is our hope, remove far from us, we pray Thee, empty hopes and presumptuous confidence. Make our hearts so right with Thy most holy and loving heart, that hoping in Thee we may do good; until that day when faith and hope shall be abolished by sight and possession, and love shall be all in all.”
− Christina G. Rossetti

In our Sunday School class, we are studying “The Power of a Praying Parent.” This book deals with the prayers we offer daily for our children – some of minor issues and some of major issues and problems that they are facing. At first I thought, “Well, our children are grown and we have grandchildren….am I right for this class?” Well, I certainly needed this class, because a child is a child, regardless of their age, and when they become adults, they give you grandchildren and the prayers of today are even more intense for our youth.

In the silence of prayer you can spread out your hands to embrace nature, God, your fellow human beings and last but not least – your loved ones. This acceptance means not only that you are ready to look at your own limitations, but that you expect the coming of something new. For this reason, every prayer is an expression of hope. If you expect nothing from the future, you cannot pray. Then you say with Bertold Brecht: All it is will stay. What we want will never come.” How do we live with this spirit of thought and prayer? If we think this way, life stands still. Spiritually, we are dead. There can be life and movement only when we no longer accept things as they are now, but look ahead toward that which has not yet occurred.

However, when it comes to prayer, it seems that we do more asking than hoping. I know lately, there are times that I can only mutter “O, Dear God…” and that is all that I can say. He knows the rest of the requests that are on my heart and I don’t have to give voice to them. I learned this a while back, but it still takes me back that sometimes my prayers consist of these three words….but what more powerful words could I say? I guess we all pray most when very specific and often critical circumstances warrant it. When there is war, we pray for peace; when there is drought, we pray for rain; when we go on vacation, we pray for nice weather; when a test is coming, we pray that we will pass; when family issues are frayed as a thinly worn thread and about to snap, we pray for healing and wholeness of our loved ones; when they are lost, we pray for them to be found; when friends are sick, we pray they will get well; and when they die, we pray for their eternal rest. Our prayer emerges in the midst of our lives and is interwoven with everything else which busies our day. Whatever fills the heart is what the mouth pours out. This is true in our prayer life.

Our hearts are filled with many concrete, tangible desires and expectations. A mother hopes her child will come home safely. A father hopes he will get a promotion. A boy dreams of the girl he loves, a child thinks of the bicycle she was promised. Often our thoughts are no further than a couple of hours, a couple of days, or a couple of weeks ahead of us – rarely as much as a couple of years. We can scarcely let ourselves think too far in advance, for the world we live in requires us to focus our attention on the here and now. If we pray, and really pray, we can hardly escape the fact that our cares for the moment, large and small, will fill our prayers and often make it nothing
but a laundry list of requests.

If we pray with hope we have a freedom that God is in control which allows us to look realistically at life without feeling dejected. Hope is to keep living amid desperation, to keep humming in the darkness. Hope is knowing that there is love, it is trust in tomorrow, and it is falling asleep and waking again when the sun rises. In the midst of a storm at sea, to discover land, in the eyes of another to see that you are understood…as long as there is hope there will also be prayer, and you will be held in God’s hands.

Grace and peace, Becky