pastor prayers

This is my favorite so far of the search engine terms that have brought people to this blog. It makes me smile every time I look at it. That may seem cruel, since I’m sure that one wouldn’t put that statement into a search engine without some serious angst. So forgive me if you’re reading this because you put exactly that combination of words in a blank box and hoped for an internet miracle.

Because that, I don’t have.

What I do have is this simple truth about prayer: the words don’t matter.

I say this as a lover of words, and a lover of putting them together and then spending hours deciding if they’re too trite or too convoluted or too long-winded or just too too. I spend much of my days doing it and then marveling at how little I am paid for my long hours of toil. But it’s true: the words don’t matter. I say this in many more words than it should take, and none of them matter, either.

What matters is that there’s this thing deep in you that needs to come out and it needs to connect, or to make itself known. It needs a quiet place to really find itself. And then it needs to come out however it will, and as much as it can, just to say the thing that only can be said at that moment, by you, to the God who had some part in making you, and making you someone who would pray just like that.

And whatever comes should be good enough for any pastor, and any public made up of God’s people.

So I hope your pastor makes you pray in public. And I hope you bring it on by singing, dancing, speaking, clapping, shouting, crying whatever that place in you is yearning to let out. God will be listening in the form of every other one of us who needs to do the same.