What Do Our Prayer Postures Tell Us?

 What did you hear during our Joys and Concerns praying last week?  What did you notice?

I noticed our postures…we didn't bow our heads like we usually do in church when we pray.  And didn’t Jesus often look up when he prayed?  I wonder what our postures can tell us?

Our postures last week were similar to our postures during circle conversation - postures of listening.

“Just as love to God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I’ve been thinking a lot about love this week.  I joined the CVC Advisory to serve the church, but now it has evolved into a committee that is surrounded and immersed in so much love that I can’t imagine my life without it.  It reminds me of Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesus.  In his letter to them we read:

And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.

The Advisory Committee prays for each other often.  We hold each other up and we bear each other’s burdens.  We pray for each other because we love each other. 

And that love involves as much listening as it does praying. In order to pray for each other we need to invite confession of problems and weaknesses and then listen. 

That invitation and listening was what I noticed during our Joys and Concerns prayers last week.  It was a joy to see and to hear.  

This week, we will stay with Romans 8:20-28:

All around us we observe a pregnant creation.  The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

I know that Rev. Donna will be listening as well as speaking.  

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