prayer meeting

I have been to prayer meetings.  I have listened to prayer requests.  Lots of them.  We used to have joys and concerns in worship service where people could verbalize their requests.

Typically our requests are for people who are sick, people who have lost jobs, people who are lonely, people who are sick and people who are sick.  These are all fine.  These are all fine.  But they do carry a common theme which sounds a bit like - "God please make the world comfortable for us humans so that we can be happy."  While such prayer requests are fine, and the Bible teaches us to ask, I don't know that God's main purpose is to make our lives comfortable.

What if, instead of prayers asking God to make life better for us, our prayer requests were about making us better.  Sweeter.  Imagine 15 people are sharing prayer requests and this is what we hear:
"Pray that God will use me.  Pray that I can be more kind.  Help me to forgive that person.  Pray that I can be more generous.  Pray that I can be more loving.  Pray that I can find more ways to serve God."

My guess is that when our prayers begin to focus on how we are giving ourselves to God for his purposes, the sick will be visited, the lonely comforted and the lost, found.  I think my friend Terry McCarty used to say something like, "be the answer to someone's prayer."

Just a thought.  Probably not a very popular one.

It's a beautiful day in God's world, be sure to see the good.