“How are you?” you greet your neighbor at the park. You ask the question like you mean it.
“Okay,” she responds. But the crease between her eyebrows and the slump of her shoulders lets you know that she is most definitely not “okay.”
“What’s the matter?” you ask, lovingly responding to her body language instead of her words.
She begins to open up. She and her husband got in a fight last night. Tears begin to flow. She’s worried about her mom’s health. She’s anxious about work. The conversation winds to a close. You would like to pray for her, but how do you cross that bridge? How do you pray for someone in need?
Perhaps the only thing stronger than our natural impulse toward the spiritual and religious is our reticence toward public displays of our religion. Last week we talked about five reasons we ought to press through our discomfort to pray for those in need. Those reasons were: