I am guilty of this. A friend or someone has opened up in some vulnerable way and just laid bare their soul before you and not knowing what to say or do, I’ve closed up the breakage with a greeting-card-sticky-pathetic-sloganized “I’ll pray for you”. Almost as if a vital artery (are there non vital arteries?) has been cut and we just slapped a band-aid on it and sent them home. I was talking online via xbox the other day with a friend of mine and he opened up about a situation that has been on his heart and mind a lot lately. I almost said “I’ll keep you in prayer, man” but I thought better of it (or more likely, I was too tired to be overly spiritual anyway) and I just told him flat out “um, I don’t really know what to say… If you are asking my opinion, then I don’t have an answer for you on this one.” For a second, everything went really quiet as if I had crossed some invisible line. Then he went on to tell me that he really only needed someone to listen and be available in that way.
I started a series awhile back called “full disclosure” and one of my little business card slogans was “I am praying for you”. But, I think I even perpetrate a misconception about prayer at times. Prayer isn’t something that we do because it’s easy to close our eyes and act like life doesn’t get messy at times. Life gets quite messy, dirty, and rather unpleasant at times. God knows that. Jesus even died on the cross a messy, horrible, even nasty death so He knows it better than we can imagine. He even prayed a messy prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood and asking His Father if there were any other way. But we often use prayer as an excuse to get out of real life situations that are quite hard to deal with. The bad part about it all is the fact that most times when we flippantly tell someone that you are praying for them, that we completely forget to do so. Or worse yet, it’s just the “Christian” (say it with sarcasm) way of telling someone to bugger off!
