Still Want to Live and Serve?

A friend asked me recently if I still wanted him to ask God to “Please let Ed live and serve.”

My response? “Absolutely! Why wouldn’t I want you to continue praying for me?”

He seemed surprised. “But we’ve been praying this for eight years! Isn’t it time to stop asking or at least time to change the prayer a little? Don’t you think,” he wondered, “that God’s tired of hearing the same thing over and over again?”

His comment unmasks a common misconception about prayer: That we should communicate with God in adult ways—trying to figure out what He wants to hear and then making sure that we get it right and don’t bore Him.

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Innocent Trust

Our first worship service was just about to begin when I noticed someone running toward my usual “preacher front-row seat.”

My sweet seven-year old granddaughter, Mary with her long brown curls and bright blue eyes ran into my arms in all of her Sunday morning best, hugged my neck and said, “Good morning, Papa!”

It wasn’t “grown-up” behavior. It was wonderfully childlike.

An adult would never do what she did. Grown-ups don’t think and act that way. Grown-up thoughts would have considered the crowd, wondered what they thought, calculated that this might be an embarrassment to them and a distraction to others and decide not to run to someone they love, hug their neck, and tell them good morning. No matter how much a grown-up might love that person, they would never express it with such innocent exuberance.

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