Anybody Got a Prayer Request?

I may be treading on sacred ground this week. It is not my intention to be offensive or inflammatory. Okay, maybe it is! But I often wonder if I am the only one who sometimes gets a little cynical about the "prayer request?"

Do not get me wrong! I pray. I believe in prayer. I think we should all pray a lot more! But the internet age has taken prayer requests to a place that, quite frankly, puts me in a state of unease! Actually, that's not true. Way prior to the internet, prayer requests have always made me a little uneasy.

I remember the first adult Bible class Teressa and I attended after getting married. The first 15-20 minutes of class were spent taking prayer requests and having a prayer for all the names mentioned. Extraordinary pressure was placed on the dude who was asked to lead that prayer. He would nervously get a pen and try to scribble all the details on the back of the church bulletin or a checking account deposit slip.

It seemed that many of the requests sounded like this---"I've got a cousin that I haven't seen in over 20 years. We used to be close when we were kids. Our families would go to the beach together. Anyway, he lives up in Rhode Island now. His son just got a new job and his son's new boss's mother just fell and broke her hip. I don't know her name, but would you please pray for her?"

Exaggeration? Maybe...but not by much! Anyone who has ever sat in a Sunday School class knows what I'm talking about. Oh, the requests were many! Almost all of them concerned physical maladies. And on more than one occasion, negative, cynical, pessimistic me could only think----REALLY?

We did have a spiritual request in that class most weeks. There was a man who requested that we pray for his step-kids who had "left the faith." What he could never muster the nerve to mention was that he was a raging domestic terrorist who was beating the high holy hell out of those "wayward kids'" mother. Sadly, he could never manage a prayer request about his rage, confessing to a serious condition that had, no doubt, driven his step-children away.

I know how hard it is to get real in Sunday School. Seriously, can we really afford to to bare our souls in church? Isn't that why we pay shrinks $100/hour to listen to us?  I am just as guilty of not being real as the domestic terrorist. And I've paid money to shrinks, too.. I can't let my christian friends know what's going on. This is church for crying out loud! In church, we only pray about the physical, never the spiritual! So, I just sit very quietly during prayer requests. Or my mind races through every cancer patient, knee replacment, and broken hip I know of so I can have a prayer request, too.

Email and social media have made the prayer request instantaneous. I get several emails a day and almost daily see a request or two on Facebook. The most common response is *Praying*. I so hope it its true. If you type *Praying* in the comment box of a request, please pray about it. Do NOT be guilty of LYING to a friend when they have asked you to pray. I never type responses to those requests, because I don't trust myself to follow through.

Until cancer goes away, we will all have something to pray about. Ninety-nine percent of requests seem to concern cancer, anyway. I have made the same requests myself.

But, my goal in my prayer life is to be LESS concerned with physical sickness and more concerned with everything else. Paul told the Philippians "in EVERYTHING, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God."

Cancer, knee replacements, and broken hips just aren't everything! There is SO much more....