Kiwanis-Rotary Prayer Breakfast
3 May 2001
“Lord, us guys here on the back row ain’t too good. Please help us not screw up.”
Sonny…friend from Niantic.. sitting in a church service…Sonny was bad about blurting things out during church. Did you Stop to Pray This Morning? “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard?” “Huh?” “Did you stop to pray? Who said you had to stop?
Imagine… someone whom you considered your best friend..you loved him more than anyone, you’d do anything for him.. You’re always sending him gifts and making his life better….but he only talks to you through formal letters and Elizabethan language. And then mainly at mealtime or bedtime or on Sunday mornings… And you find that instead of a friend, you’ve become a rabbit’s foot that he strokes for good luck.
National Day of prayer…a joy to be speaking to the chief movers and shakers of our community about the one thing that can make this community move and shake like it’s never been moved and shook before…PRAYER.
Where in the heck do we get our strange ideas about prayer? The Bible? Not much… Tongues of fire around discliples King David dancing before the Lord Christ praying himself to tears I’ve searched the scriptures yet never found this passage: “So Christ told his disciples, ‘Go Ye out and pray to me at Sunday brunch, unless though art at the Country Club or Vic’s where thouest may be thought schizophrenic or at least Pentecostal. Sit in orderly rows when you worship and repeat this prayer written by your national church’s committee at their last conference in Kansas City. Speakest thou not me directly, but in language befitting Hamlet, Lady MacBeth, and your high school English teacher.’” I’m still looking, but I haven’t found that passage.
How should we pray? It depends… How do we live?” I live in a car. That’s where I pray. You may live in an office or in a truck…that’s where you pray.
--- Louis Armstrong: “There are times you’re in the grove and the sound is so sweet and that’s perfection. “Then you rise a notch higher and the melody becomes a part of you, and that’s heaven. “Then once in a while…just once in a while…the music takes over and you just follow along and that boy…that’s called Prayer.”
---Camp… deaf boy
---Friend of mine….. dance
---Lady in Mt. Vernon…. Prayer chair
---- My great grandma’s diary.. “rose early this morning, gathered eggs and did the milking, brought in the horses from the pasture, scrubbed the upstairs floors, then woke the men for breakfast.” .. nearly every morning’s entry started with “This is just about the finest day ever.” That was her prayer…daily praising God for a glorious day. Claude. “Still in shock over Claude.. but the sun rose bright this morning.. just about the finest day ever.”
---Billy Graham… 2 ladies
---This Present Darkness
Triopia was recently the subject of a very flattering piece in the Journal Courier.. but the real strength of our school got lost in the editing. Moms in Touch … Each mother is assigned a teacher to pray for, for the entire year. Lady: every Thursday morning..notepad in hand.
Last Day of school last year. Travis.. drug trouble.. meeting with superintendent.. Dylan came in.. I want to talk about Travis.. I think we should pray for him.
Frank Johnson.. Ford 8N Farmed near the Quad Cities… Two toolboxes.. poetry, the Bible “All my fields ran east and west. When I drove west I read. When I faced the risin’ son, I prayed.” Tools? “In the shed. Never could fix….”
~Henry Ward Beecher “I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.”
Something as natural as breathing… Actor in New Salem.. turned US.. “Help.” What? What? “I was praying. That’s God’s favorite prayer. Help.”
As a father, as a mother… how hurt you would be if your son or daughter thought that they had to beg you for the necessities of life. When all you wanted was a simple, “Help.”
I’m not talking about religion.. I’m talking about prayer… I’m talking about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ… a relationship so personal that nothing is too small in inconsequential to bring to Him. I don’t know the source of this, but it’s one of my favorite thoughts on religion versus prayer. First saw it in the study of a local Lutheran pastor: “Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
Or the Indian Proverb: “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”
Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave, said, “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” This is the National Day of Prayer. Let us begin this day with a new attitude toward talking to God. Put him across the table from you when you eat, put him on the fender of your Ford 8N. Put him in your car and beside your desk and even in those places where you think He might not want to go. Take my word for it: He wants to be there, too.
And please don’t think you’re too old or too experienced to pray the prayer of a young boy: “Jesus, us guys here on the back row ain’t too good. Please help us not screw up too bad.”
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