At ‘Thursdays’ last night, we did something that I thought was pretty amazing. It was such a small thing, but I feel like it made such a huge difference for so many of the people at the service. It did for me, anyway.
We all came to ‘Thursdays’ with a list of prayer requests that we had. Our names weren’t written on the lists, and we all put them into big plastic buckets in the back of the sanctuary. After we’d had announcements and sung a few praise and worship songs, we all walked to the back of the sanctuary, filed past the plastic buckets and picked up someone else’s list of prayer requests. And then we broke off into the sanctuary, sat in semi-silence and prayed for whomever it was who’d written out the list we had grabbed, while Anthony played the guitar.
To pray for someone without knowing their name seemed a little odd at first; I’ve never done anything like that before. I spent a few moments, before I started praying, just reading over the list in my hand and trying to guess who might possibly have written it (was it someone I knew?) before I realized that it didn’t really matter who had written the list. The entire point of what we were doing at ‘Thursdays’ last night wasn’t to find out about other people’s secrets so you could have dirt on them; the point was to give others a chance to be honest about what they’re struggling with and to give them some sort of support.
It was nice to be reminded that I am not as important as I think I am. It was good to step away from myself for a few minutes and to pray for someone else. To focus on their problems, and not to be so centered on myself. Everyone around me has a story, I need to remember, and something that they’re dealing with. I am not the center of the universe, and it would do me good to look at the bigger picture once in a while.
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