I’m not sure how your church handles prayer requests, but our church handles them in two ways: we have a green card you can write your prayer request on, stick in the offering plate, and have the church leadership pray for during the week, AND we also have an open time during our worship service where attendees can raise their hand, get called on by our pastor, and publicly explain their prayer request/praise report. At the end of that time, our pastor will have one giant corporate prayer, including everyones’ request/praise.
It’s an interesting time, to say the least. I’ve heard prayer requests ranging from “my daughter has cancer” to “I just want to praise God my pap smear came back clear”(spoken from a woman who had decided to inform the entire church of her annual obgyn visit). It can get a little crazy sometimes, especially when you start comparing them–which is what I tend to do.
There are some Sundays I feel people try to one-up each other with prayer request severity. “I’ll see your neighbor with the broken leg and raise you my cousin’s car accident.” ”Oh yeah, I’ll see that and raise you my grandma dying” “Well, today is the anniversary of my mom’s death AND my cousin’s boyfriend just came down with dysentery, so take that!” Ok, so maybe I made that last one up, but you get the idea.
Problem is, while it’s funny to watch, it also happens to paralyze me when it comes to raising my hand for my own prayer requests.
The first time it happened was about 8 months ago. I had been feeling sick, but forced myself to go to church because I hadn’t been in a while.
Prayer Request time came around, and I got ready to raise my hand. Then it happened.
Before I stretch my arm to the ceiling and declare myself sick, someone else raised their hand and was called on. Their neighbor had cancer.
Right after that request, someone else raised their hand and spoke about how their father was about to have some kind of heart surgery.
After that, there was a death in the family.
My heart sunk. There was no way I could raise my hand now. What would I say? “Yes, I’ve had a bit of a cold for the past couple of days, I’d just like prayer to feel better.”
I could envision it now: “God, please help John Doe get through his life threatening heart surgery. Please be with Jane Doe as she deals with this breast cancer. Oh, and help Nick feel better from his man-cold.”
I would be a laughing stock. No way my prayer request would ever match up to the severity of cancer or heart surgery. So I kept quiet.
And while I know God does not look at prayer requests that way, I can’t help but feel a little inadaquate. I start comparing my prayer requests to everyone else’s, and when I judge mine to be less severe, I stay silent, almost as if God would rather not hear about it.
“Don’t worry about me God! Deal with the heart surgery and the cancer–I’ll be ok”
Thankfully, that’s not how God works. He doesn’t sit there in Heaven ranking our prayer requests by how bad they sound, and then doling out answers to them in order of severity. If He did, I think we’d ALL be in trouble, cause there are some really desperate and needy people in the world. But there I go again, comparing prayer requests!
And so I have to remind myself of that every once in a while, and send up my prayer request even if I don’t think it will ‘measure up’ to everyone else’s.
Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever felt like you had an inadequate prayer request? What did you do about it?
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