Reason 6 - Saying Something Wrong

Last time, we talked about praying out loud. Have you tried it yet? If you do pray regularly, try doing it out loud even (especially) if no one is around. It’s more difficult than it seems. Well, at least for me. I think it’s because when you think your prayer, your mind kinda glosses over the exact words, and you just think of the meaning or intention of your prayer. So let’s say my grandmother is sick. When I pray in my head, I “think” of her being sick, what’s wrong with her, and I pray for healing in those areas. But out loud, not only do I have to think of her being sick, I have to think how to express that into words, hopefully understandable words. It’s a whole other ballgame.

As I’ve said in the previous post, you have to think quickly when you’re praying out loud. Not only do you have to think about what you have to pray about, but also how to go about saying it. In my experience, people don’t want to hear just the answer. They want to hear more about why you said it and explain more about the answer. Even though other people don’t ask you what you mean during prayer, it’s kinda implied that you should explain your prayer request while you pray. Whereas, alone, I could pray for my grandmother who is sick, has a bad hip, whatever, however, in the group, I have to say how she’s sick, what’s bothering her, and how God should heal her. I just want her healed, in any way possible, whether through miraculous healing, drugs, acupuncture, whatever. But during the group prayer, you need to reword it, to make it polite. So, instead, I would say, “Lord if it’s your will, we know that Your plan is always right, we know that you have the best in mind for each one of us, and even though we don’t know what exactly is Your plan, we know to expect Good Things from you, please heal my grandmother. (Amen!) For she is Your faithful servant, (amen!) and she has dedicated her life to you. Please have compassion on her and take away her pain. (Amen)” Those amens aren’t mine, but are usually from the other fervent people praying. I’ll talk more about those later.

As you can see, I put in a lot of conditional clauses, because I don’t want to offend anyone’s personal belief system. Also, we don’t want our prayers to seem to go unanswered or be flat wrong. It’s kinda like hedging your bets, if you know what that means. So let’s say Grandma dies. Since we went on public record as asking God for healing, it would seem like God didn’t hear our prayers. This might lead others to think, “Oh, maybe we didn’t pray hard enough” or worse, “God doesn’t hear our prayers”. So we always have to include an out as it were. “If this is your will”. We don’t know God’s will, his will is unfathomable. We know his ultimate will, which is the reunification of Man to himself, but we don’t know what his specific will or plan is for my grandmother or myself for that matter. So if God did take my grandmother away, “it was according to His will.” Which, as you may have noticed, I prayed about.

With all this extra stuff to pray about out loud, there’s a high chance that I might say something wrong. Sometimes called “Freudian slips”, if I don’t think before I speak, unfortunate things may be said. I try not to judge people (out loud), but your mind is very unfiltered. It easily thinks up nasty thoughts, it automatically classifies people and things so that your brain can store things better. This guy is my friend, John. He’s black, and buff, and drives a bike. He’s bald and got a big nose, black skin…. That’s how our brains work. We analyze every detail so that next time I see a black, bald dude riding a motorcycle, I can instantly recognize him as “John”. You can see the problem right now. If I don’t think what I say, my unfiltered mind may go directly into my speech and before I know it, I’m calling John, “the black guy” or something. And then I’d probably get punched in the face. Leading a prayer is like that. My mind is on so much overload, that things may slip out before my mind has a chance to filter it into something politically correct. Words can easily come out wrong too. Where I meant to say “Bless our deacons”, it could come out “Bless our beacons”. And that’s just a mild slip-up, it could be a lot worse.

The problem is a lot worse for me when I don’t even know what to pray about. In one prayer meeting I went, as a group, we were asked to pray about our neighborhood. I had no idea what to say. Thankfully, I blotted out most of it from my memory. I remember a lot of pauses and silences, and I’m pretty sure there was some rambling in there. I think I also talked about homosexuals and the government, but I’m not too sure. I also repeated myself… a lot, which if you don’t know, I hate doing. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very fun evening after that. I remember another time when I made fun of President Bush in a prayer. Readers, take it from me, you don’t want to interject any political satire (no matter how funny YOU may think it is) into prayer. It will not go well. How come prayer and humor don’t mix? I personally think that God has a great sense of humor… He invented it after all.