Kiwanis Prayer Breakfast
May 2003
I stand before you a happy man. _____ minutes ago the Triopia senior class took off for three days in Indianapolis and I’m not on the bus. To be standing before you now after 18 years of senior trips gives new meaning to the term “World Day of Prayer.”
Asked Roger … Are you sure you want me to speak again? Three years in a row… Am I Jacksonville’s resident holy man? No… You’re Jacksonville’s resident brief speaker who works cheap. And that’s what you’ll get from me again today.
Email from Heller.. can’t be there.. Card’s game late Wed night.. Reply: “That’s okay. You’ll be a good example of why we need to pray.”
Prayer is a tricky subject.. everyone thinks that they know how they should pray.. and everyone is secretly and terribly afraid that they don’t know how to pray.
Reminds me a great deal of the fellas who meet every morning at the Arenzville coffee shop when they talk about their trucks. There’s no doubt that each of them is the expert but they secretly wonder what the other guy knows that they don’t.
I’m not sure what I know about prayer…except that I’m still learning. Two days ago I got a phone call from a young friend in Springfield. 16 years old…discovered that he had a tumor at the base of his brain. He’d no sooner got the words out of his mouth than my front door opened.. you don’t knock in Arenzville…you just come in.. a freshman boy with his 7th-grade sister. They saw that I was on the phone so the boy mouthed the words, “Do you care if we pray?”
I’m not sure what I know about prayer…except that I’m still learning. Several years ago… Valentine’s Day.. call at 6:30 in the morning.. an elderly lady from Chapin.. “Don’t worry, beloved, I’m praying that angels surround you.” Hung up. Strange. Ten minutes later…head-on collision on the ice. .paramedic.. hit so hard my shoulder harness broke lose from the car.. I had the steering wheel stuck in my leg but I walked away… I’m not sure what I know about prayer …except that I’m still learning.
Some believe in the trickle down theory of prayer…first proposed …I think…by Pope Ronald I. If you throw up enough prayers, surely one or two will stick and the blessings will trickle down to you. This theory says that God is impressed by quantity. As if God will forget your name unless you remind Him frequently.
Some adhere to the hotdog theory. If it’s longer then it must be better. If that were the case, then heaven would be filled with long-winded blowhards and I don’t much want to go there.
Instead…consider the simplest theory you can imagine… friendship. The scriptures say that God made man because He wanted fellowship and that, my friends, hasn’t changed one whit since the creation of the world.
As James Weldon Johnson put it in his great poem, The Creation: Then God walked around, And God looked around On all that He had made. He looked at His sun, And He looked at His moon, And He looked at His little stars; He looked on His world With all its living things, And God said, "I'm lonely still." Then God sat down On the side of a hill where He could think; By a deep, wide river He sat down; With His head in His hands, God thought and thought, Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Simple friendship. A relationship with God.
Do you have friends like mine? Let me name a couple…Jerry and Rich. I see them once a year as we show up to do our Christian Performing Arts Camps at Green Pastures. It has sometimes literally been twelve months since I’ve seen them..yet the moment we meet, we have everything in common. I’ll bet you have friends like that. And I also have people whom I speak with every day with whom I have very little in common. Does the frequency with which I talk to them speak to the depth of our relationship?
I guess my message is this on this World Day of Prayer. God is not impressed by the number of our prayers or by their length or volume (I emphasize the length part for any clergy in the audience this morning.) What touches His heart is the depth of our desire… The scriptures say that God knows our need before it even reaches our lips. God wants but one thing …a relationship with each one of us. … We do not pray to get our prayers answered. We pray so that we may take another step closer to the living God. We pray to praise Him and thank Him. We pray to ask forgiveness. Those are the two things God can’t do on His own. He can heal your family problems in a minute… but He can’t take a step closer to you…. That’s your job.. that’s my job. God simply wants you to get to know Him better… and that’s why we pray.
The second shift is now coming in at the Arenzville coffee shop. They will talk about their trucks. They will disagree with everyone present about the way a Dodge can lug it out in mud and the way the Ford has an indestructible transmission. The GMC owners, (who are the Presbyterians and Episcopalians of the automotive world) will knowingly shake their heads and not even enter into the conversation, knowing full well that no one has a truck like theirs.
But when their coffee’s done, they’ll pay their tab and they’ll return to their truck..usually alone. And from that point on, it’ll be just them and their truck. You might laugh to call this a friendship or a metaphor for prayer, but you don’t know what some of these trucks are like. The driver can find every knob blindfolded. He knows exactly how hard he can press on the accelerator when there’s ice on the Arenzville hill. His seat cushion fits his bottom exactly and no other cushion fits that particular bottom quite as nicely. He knows his truck. Silly as it might sound, it’s a friendship.
We could do worse on this World Day of Prayer to at least start a relationship with God that’s as comfortable as our truck.
Johnson ends his poem with this: Up from the bed of the river God scooped the clay; And by the bank of the river He kneeled Him down; And there the great God Almighty Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand; This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image; Then into it He blew the breath of life, And man became a living soul. Amen. Amen.
Prayer? A simple Friendship with our God. Be blessed. Pray.
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