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| DEEPER IN PRAYER, AND QUIETER |
| April 18, 2007 |
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Transfixed as we still are by the massacre of 32 people at Virginia
Tech, we do not lose sight of the fact that there is more every day: 80
people perished in one car-bombing in Baghdad this morning, with dozens more wounded. Death came calling this week, close to home, but it's a regular visitor in a world at war.
These are the times to go deeper and deeper in prayer. So many people
are involved in so many ways, and there isn't one who is not a child of
God, not one to whom we are not called to join ourselves in prayer.
Because it can be so hard to pray for someone who wishes me harm, I have learned to allow God to give me that kind of prayer as the gift it can
only be. I don't have what it takes to pray for my enemy, one of the
many ways in which I can tell I'm not Jesus. That prayer must come to
me from God. I can only step back from the whirlpool of my horror and
fear and present the one for whom I cannot pray to God. I lack the
power to do more.
But I must do that much. Not for us, the prim refusal to engage the
enemy in prayer. It is not for us to turn away -- we only compound the
sum of the world's enmity if we do that. I can't let my pain and anger
keep me away, even if I know myself to be able to overcome it under my
own steam.
And so I speak the name of the one whose motives I cannot understand,
will never understand, the one whose sorrow is so enormous that my heart buckles under its weight. I only speak the name, and then I let God take it from there.
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| Copyright © 2024 Barbara Crafton |
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