The Priority of Corporate Prayer

              For the past couple of weeks, my church has been emphasizing prayer.  I appreciate the words that have been shared.  From things that I have been thinking about for several months and actually pet peeves that I have had for years, I would like to take the challenge just a little deeper.

              We have heard the importance of prayer.  We have heard about the beauty of being able to commune with our Creator.  We have discussed how much God wants to hear from us and how much he wants to heal our broken world.

              The struggle that I have with modern corporate prayer is the realization of how often it is used for transition.  We pray while the worship team quietly exits the stage.  We pray for the offering, not so much that God would bless our giving hearts and the resources he has blessed us with, but instead the prayer indicates to the ushers that they need to come forward so that we can take the offering.  We enter prayer times in our service so that the tech team can sneak onto the stage and fix technical glitches.  We offer up prayers that use special code phrases to indicate that we are skipping a song in the worship set.  So, we know about the importance and value of prayer, but the only times that we pray in our church services are scripted.

              I recently heard an interesting interview with the late Leonard Nimoy.  The point that stands out to me in the interview is his definition of why we close our eyes during prayer.  I have always been told that we close our eyes to help us focus, to close out the distractions around us.  According to Nimoy, the reason Jews are taught to close their eyes is because if the Shekinah glory of God showed up while the congregation was praying, they might die.  It really changes the focus not only of closing our eyes, but the focus of corporate prayer in general.

              As Christians, we know that God is always with us, and so we don’t anticipate anything greater happening during our services when we pray.  It is okay to move about the room to exit the stage or fix tech glitches because what is the worst that could happen if we didn’t?  We don’t expect God to really be present in our services, and so we expect very little.  Prayer helps the performance of our worship services to run more smoothly, so why not take advantage of it?

              Perhaps we should expect more of God.  Perhaps we should expect more of our corporate prayer.

The Funny Thing About Depression

               I have dealt with depression for most of my life.  I can’t say that anything ever started it, but there are seasons when things trigger and it is worse.  The thing that is interesting to me is that one of the things that usually raised me out of my sadness is the absolute humor of dealing with people as I deal with depression.  I really don’t think they know what they are doing.

              Two years ago, I hit one of my triggers.  It was interesting because it was one of the first times that I feel like anybody noticed naturally what I was going through.  The funny thing is that he handed me a flier about dealing with depression, said “If you need anything, please let me know,” and walked away.  I wanted to call after him, “No, I should be good.  I got this pamphlet.  Thanks!”

              A few months later, we had a short rash of suicides at the school that I work at.  Two of the students were from my classes.  (Again, one of my colleagues recognized that this might be affecting me specifically – so I did get a huge bucket of cookie dough out of it.)  Since the whole school was on heightened awareness, we got a district booklet.  There were lots of ideas in the booklet of warning signs to look for in depressed individuals.  I tried a few of them to see if anybody would actually notice:  For example I didn’t brush my hair or do any maintenance on my beard for 3 months.  When nobody seemed to notice, I decided to call it a failed experiment and went back to life as normal.

One of the other suggestions in the booklet that I thought was interesting was not to try to befriend a depressed person, but instead to inform social services personnel – I guess friendship with depressed people should be left to paid professionals.  We can’t allow depressed people to have unsupervised friendships.  Who knows what disastrous things could happen?

            Around this same time, Melinda Kathleen Reese started her beautiful mistranslation series called Google Translate Sings.  Her first song came at a very timely moment.  She took the lyrics of "Let It Go" and translated them into other languages and back to English, the result became the theme song of my life for at least a month - "Give Up."  Horrible timing for the message of the song, but it gave me more reasons to laugh.

              I think my favorite story from this particular period of my life is when I came across a spare length of rope.  It was pretty obvious who the rope belonged to, so I thought I would do him a favor and return the rope to him.  He said that he no longer had any need for the rope.  “You can keep it and use it for whatever you may need.”  Since he didn’t need it, I decided the best thing to do would be to throw it away.

              A few weeks later, Robin Williams died (suicide by belt - an option that I'd never before considered - thanks to the national news for adding that little detail).  It was interesting to see how people around me handled the situation and especially the things they said.  “How is it that somebody that is so happy and constantly bringing joy to other people could consider killing themselves?”  Sometimes depressed people use humor to keep themselves sane.  There are humorous things that happen every day.  Sometimes it’s the humor of depression that keeps us going.  Thanks for the laughs.