Prayer for Change

According to the Pew Research Center 70.6% of American adults describe themselves as Christians, and more than half (55%) of Americans say they pray every day. This week, after the tragedy in Charleston, even more of us will be praying. We will be praying for the victims, for their families, their community and our nation. We will be praying for comfort and healing and peace. We will be praying to know how to forgive the unforgivable. But even though so many of us pray to the same God and profess to follow His Word from the same book we are still incredibly divided. As a nation and as followers of Christ we are not all on the same page. We are divided by race, politics, economics, social issues, and much more. We read the same scripture but come up with vastly different interpretations of what it means and how we are supposed to apply it.

In Thoughts on Solitude Thomas Merton writes, “the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.” That could be the case for any of us. And we could be following God’s will in one part of our lives while completely missing it in other parts. We are all human. We all have places where we are wrong. We could be joyfully serving and seeing God work miracles in our lives yet still have thoughts and believes in other areas that are in contradiction to His teaching.

I know we cannot go around pointing at the splinters in each other’s eyes. I do not have firmer ground than anyone else to say that the way I read scripture is right and their way is wrong. However, those of us who profess to follow Christ, those of us who pray, we can ask for our errors to be revealed to us. Each of us can privately ask God to convict us of our own biases, our ignorance, and the ways we misunderstand and judge not just our fellow humans but our fellow Christians. The over 150,000,000 of us that say we reach out to God every day can ask to see people and situations not through the lens of our own prejudices but as closely as possible to His perspective. He will answer this prayer. He will show us the hard parts of ourselves that we need Him to soften, the wrong beliefs we didn’t know we had, and He will help us change.

Those of us who follow Christ are to be His light in the world. We are supposed to be known by our love for each other and for all His people. If we can acknowledge the shadowy places within ourselves and prayerfully ask to be changed individually then we can truly come together as brothers and sisters to pull out the dark roots of hate and anger that divide us. Through His strength, power and love we can unify our families, communities and country.

 

 

 

 


 

The light shines in darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. -John 1:5

This Little Light, Acrylic on Paper & Frame, 2014
This Little Light, Acrylic on Paper & Frame, 2014