Question: What can we / should we pray about?

Answer: Absolutely anything and everything!

The solution is already present in any discordant situation, big or small, meaningful or trivial, be it with a body or a machine, when we turn away from the material “evidence” and look for the spiritual reality, (in other words, what God knows), which is always good, always whole, always harmonious.

Eugene Peterson’s interpretation of Mark 11:24 in The Message puts it this way:

Jesus was matter-of-fact: “Embrace this God-life. Really embrace it, and nothing will be too much for you. This mountain, for instance: Just say, ‘Go jump in the lake’—no shuffling or shilly-shallying—and it’s as good as done. That’s why I urge you to pray for absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life, and you’ll get God’s everything. And when you assume the posture of prayer, remember that it’s not all asking. If you have anything against someone, forgive—only then will your heavenly Father be inclined to also wipe your slate clean of sins.”

“…pray for absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life, and you’ll get God’s everything.” I like that.

This subject came to my thought this morning as I was reading the daily short inspirational article in the newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.

The author (who obviously lived in a very cold part of the US) had a new-ish boiler that had been breaking down continually over two years and though they had used several different engineers from different companies, no-one had been able to fix it permanently – or even discover what the problem was and she’d just been told that just looking at the boiler, without fixing it, was going to cost her more than double the price she’s been quoted over the phone. She writes:

Our frustration and outrage were at the boiling point. All human help had been utterly useless. I felt the only place I could turn to was God. So I reached out whole-heartedly in prayer.

A thought came that I needed to change my view of the situation. This was a pretty surprising idea – that in order to fix our boiler, I had to change my thinking. But as I thought about it, I realized that I had been grossly misjudging the technician's intelligence and doubting his abilities, and saw that this had to stop….

You can read what happened here:

[url]'Judge not'[/url]

It reminded me of a time when I was asked to pray for a friend who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphona. (In case you’re wondering, yes he did have a wonderful healing one night when the room with filled with white light and he felt bathed with divine Love and the next morning, all the tumours around his neck were gone and X-ray showed that the one on his lung had shrunk to the size of a pea – all before any medical treatment had started.)

Anyway, this friend and I had been working on changing fearful and also resentful thought to a consciousness filled with gratitude and love and as well as the physical healing, he had some other surprises, especially in connection with supply. One little experience that meant a lot to him and his wife was one chilly night when they thought they’d like to light the fire but didn’t have any firewood and they thought, “Let’s go over to Judy’s (I wasn’t there) and borrow some of hers.” Before they even reached my home, their way was blocked by the dead branch of a tree that had fallen over the road – which had broken into log-sized pieces.

His pick-up truck had been out of service for three months and he desperately needed it for work (he was a builder). He couldn’t afford to take it to a garage, so had constantly been trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Shortly after he started the daily gratitude journal that I’d suggested, he walked outside, looked at the truck and knew exactly what was wrong and fixed it in 5 minutes!

I had a similar experience once when our main computer at my church’s bookshop (where I work) had gone wonky. The cursor was jumping all over the place. We’d contacted two computer whiz kids who used to work there and they suggested it was a virus and other things. We jumped through hoops trying everything, even bought new software – nothing worked. I came in one day and my colleague was on the computer, struggling to get anything to work. Clear as if a light bulb had come on, I heard an angel message, (I understand angels to be God’s thoughts passing to humankind) saying, “It’s the mouse.” So I told my friend that and she said, “Don’t be silly…” (and gave me all the reasons it couldn’t be the mouse.) Well, I wasn’t going to argue and I wasn’t going to ignore that very specific message either (I don’t know a thing about computers), so I went to the other computer, unplugged the mouse and brought it to the faulty one. Everything worked.

Prayer is the desire to see things as God sees them, to open our thought and listen. As the lady in the first account said,

My prayers hadn’t begged God to fix the boiler [or computer] or asked Him to make me love people. They were inspired by a confident trust in Him that an all-knowing and all-acting God had created us to be knowledgeable and right-acting…

I’ve got loads more examples of how all the answers are already present, before we even ask, but would love to hear about others’ experiences first.

Love and peace,

Judy