Tag Archives: religion

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Praying for Pokemon Cards

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I struggle a lot with prayer. I never know how specific I should get with my prayers. Should I be asking God to give me Ferraris, introduce me to Zooey Deschanel, and become a best-selling author? I don’t know. But sometimes I feel like a little kid when I pray, asking for things that I think I want but actually don’t. What was the number one request of child Spencer? Pokemon cards. Do I still use my Pokemon cards? No. I wish I had asked for books. Lots and lots of books. And I feel like this is what it’s like when we come to God for something. God knows our own destinies infinitely better than we do and so asking an omniscient being for things seems a bit childish.

For a long time, I thought prayer was silly because of this passage from Jesus in Matthew:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. (Matthew 6:25-26)

Notice how this passage says nothing about prayer. I was severely misguided in my thoughts. See, Jesus, only a few verses earlier is teaching his disciples how to pray. I guess I always kind of glossed over that part because it wasn’t a very compelling story. But there is a very compelling story of prayer that happens really early on in the Bible.

This story occurs in Genesis 18. Abraham has been hanging out with God for a while. Abraham was one of those cool people that God actually walked around with. And they chatted, probably hiking mountains together and watching the sunrise and cool stuff like that. But in Genesis 18, God tells Abraham that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities that have fallen into such sin that they would make Las Vegas look like Heaven on Earth. This doesn’t sit well with Abraham. So he asks God if God will save Sodom and Gomorrah if there are at least 50 righteous people in these cities. God grants that He won’t. And Abraham asks, “Well what about 45?” And again God grants that He won’t. All of this goes on for a while until Abraham gets down to 5, and God again grants that 5 righteous people would be enough.

This story is so powerful. Obviously, God never intended to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there were righteous people there, but it was important that Abraham ask for their salvation. Sometimes, we get it into our head that if God already knows everything, then we don’t need to ask him for anything. But God wants us to. He wants to have a personal relationship with us. He wants to talk and hear about our lives, and even though He knows how He can make it better, He wants to know how we think it could be made better.

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Dancing a Sacred Song

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I like to look around in places where we aren’t supposed to notice other people. One of my favorite places to look around is church. People do surprising things at churches. The only churches I’ve ever gone to regularly are contemporary, postmodern types where it’s not really clear what denomination anyone is. I can’t really see myself being happy anywhere else. I am too much of a pluralist to find denominational churches appealing. And one of the pluses of non-denominational churches is that they typically have really good contemporary music. I’m not much of a singer so I really like worship bands that are loud. That way the loudness can kind of drown out all of my self-conscious thoughts about being a bad singer. Plus, I just like hearing music that sounds like music I might hear on the radio. It makes it feel like I might be worshiping all the time, not just on Sundays when the worship team is leading the congregation in Psalms.

Anyway, the best time to look around at church is while everyone is singing. Everyone’s kind of into their own thing. I imagine if you were some sort of psychologist and knew what all the signals meant, you could really tell a lot about people based on what they do while they are supposed to be singing at church. Some people are spending time with God. Others are doing what they think makes them look like they are spending time with God. There are a couple of people who are more concerned with what their neighbor is doing. Some dudes are standing with their arms crossed. They can’t even soften up at church. Parents are busy trying to keep their kids from going somewhere they shouldn’t, which always kind of strikes me as silly because one of the best things about worshiping at church is when one of the small kids breaks away from her parents.

Corinna Phillips and Kim Lyons by Barbara Jewell © Barbara Jewell/Lois Greenfield Photography Workshop!

She never really goes anywhere. She just stays there right in front of her parents and starts to dance. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because of the simplicity of the thing. She doesn’t comprehend all of the metaphysical things we are taught to think about when we are worshiping – raise your heart to God, let the words be a prayer to God, praising God as a community is important, and all that sort of thing. Instead, she hears music, and she dances. She probably knows that she is in God’s house and that God loves her very much. And so for her, it’s kind of like dancing in front of her grandparents. And it kind of makes me think that we spend all of this time stressing out about God’s will, and we really shouldn’t. All of that stressing out could be avoided if we just started dancing. We won’t always get it right. But that’s okay because God has our back. Sometimes the little girl tries to climb up on the pastor’s chair on the stage, and at that point, her parents have to lovingly tell her to come back.