Shaping our earthquake prayers

(continuation of LSA Update article: "Uncharted territory of a pavlova")

see the end of this post for a copy of the lead-in comments

I suspect that there have been an awful lot of prayers offered in recent days as we respond to the tragedy of the New Zealand earthquake. I use awful deliberately in two senses: Firstly in the throw- away slang or colloquial sense that there have been heaps of prayers offered. Secondly - while I don’t want to sound judgemental (it is not up to us to be judgemental about prayers), I suspect that some of these prayers have been (to use some thesaurus results for awful) – dreadful, terrible, appalling, bad, poor.

Having said that though, can I quickly re-iterate on a brief comment from the Update lead-in comments … when it comes to prayer, rule number one is “There are no rules.” The last thing I want to do is to create any sort of guilt or inadequacy feeling about anyone’s prayer offerings. Let’s keep in the back of our minds a couple of brilliant little encouragements:

1. “Prayer: Just do it” – to borrow something from Nike - one of the corporate world’s most successful advertising slogans ever.

2. “Prayer catapults us into the frontier of spiritual life” (Richard Foster: “Celebration of Discipline”

… in other words, just starting out on a prayer – regardless of form, style, content, is a HUGE step in itself. It carries with it some massive acknowledgments, for example:

• that there is a God somewhere out there

• the incredible trust that He can hear what is on our lips (and in our thoughts and minds when we pray silently)

• the faith that goes with it to trust and believe that He may well do something about our prayer requests.

… so, anyone who simply starts out on a prayer has automatically thrown themselves into the deep end of spiritual life!

These reflections therefore are not meant to be critical – they are offered as encouragements for us to think about the way that we shape our prayers when praying for and about difficult situations like the Christchurch earthquake.

How often do we frame our prayer petitions something along the lines of -

… and we pray for all of those people affected by the earthquake.

… we pray that you would be with the people in Christchurch

… help all those who are hurting because of the earthquake in NZ

Some comments:

• What sort of God do we believe in? Do we think that He is going to be able to wave some sort of magic wand in response to our prayer thoughts; that he will somehow magically go in and fix things up now; that he will restore and even reverse the pain and brokenness?

• Praying that He be with … is that bordering on an insult? Properly understood, God is already there, he was part of the pain, in and under the rubble, he is already in and with every single living person ever created. He sustains us, his spirit is the breath within us that gives us life.

• How is God going to help those who are hurting? We are His hands and feet, eyes and ears – we are the help that God provides. God is present in the people on the ground searching through the rubble or providing emergency food and accommodation; in the rescue teams that have been sent from all over the world; in the people who assist from a distance by supporting with monetary aid, or by supporting the release of SES volunteers to join in the rescue.

• We are challenged to accompany prayer with action: If we pray … “would you please care for old Mrs so and so” … and then fail to phone, visit her in person, or arrange for our community to in some way respond … that becomes a rather hollow prayer. We need to answer the call to respond out of love to those around us who are in need.

OK – I concede that if we believe in a God who can rattle together a universe, then fixing up the aftermath of an earthquake is analogous to nothing more than repairing an annoying ugly pimple that has made an untimely appearance to mess up someone’s otherwise flawless visual complexion. Technically we would have to think it possible. However in these later New Testament days, for whatever reason, God has chosen not to directly and publicly intervene with the daily operations of the planet. That is not to say that he has gone totally AWOL from the engine room, it rather seems that God is happy to take a back seat role, knowing that he has billions of worker bees out there to do the job!

Some possible prayer starters …

 Lord help us through your spirit working in us, to move us into action to respond in appropriate ways to the needs of the people in Christchurch.

 Show us ways Lord that we can help to be your hands and feet, ears and eyes

 Lord we know that you have been with the people in Christchurch through this whole ordeal. Help them to feel your reassuring presence especially as you move us into action through support teams of every description

 Lord grant to the NZ government and services special wisdom to help them best plan the nation’s response

Nev

Uncharted territory of a pavlova

I stretched my comfort zone in the kitchen this week to take on the never previously attempted task of creating a pavlova. The whole ordeal was not without some tense moments. I was (apparently) inappropriately “gunning the engine” or driving my wife’s new Kenwood more in the way that was synonymous with my car rally driving in an earlier chapter of my life. In the end though, there was a more than satisfactory result, especially in that it drew high praise from the one who is the benchmark of all things to do with (preparing) food in our house!

Funny how the human brain works though. I had in the back of my mind writing about something to do with the earthquake. My brain connected the fragile crust of the pav with the way that God chose to rattle together the earth giving it a deceptively thin and unpredictably unstable crust.

Really what I want to reflect on is the way in which we respond to such tragic natural disasters, especially focusing in on our prayer response. While the number one rule of prayer I believe should always be – “there are no rules” … nevertheless I think there are some useful guidelines that can help us deal with tough situations like this. Having now already “waffled” on for long enough in this space without really getting to the nitty gritty, I invite readers to follow this link for some thoughts on shaping our earthquake prayers