I Can't Pray for You...

A few years back I worked at a large church- more than 60 employees. There were a lot of positives and a lot of negatives to working in an environment like that, but one I never saw coming: Prayer fatigue. 

The email prayer machine there was relentless. People would call the front desk, or talk to someone on staff and *ding*... a new request would land in my inbox. There was no filter- Whether the request was from someone on staff, someone in the church or a friend of the great aunt of someone one of the ushers knew in Idaho- they all landed in my inbox with the same attention-demanding thud. 

Most interesting thing- the emails all came to everyone on staff except one person: the senior pastor. Someone had realized that level of email volume and detail would be very distracting for him. 

They never thought that maybe it might be too much for the rest of us as well. 

Do you all do this? Do you pass on every email prayer request to your whole staff? 

Here's an article I wrote back then- one that along with this one actually contributed to getting me, uh... transitioned on to church planting. But that's a story for another time... :)

I Can't Pray For You by Bob Hyatt

 

I need you people to stop sending me prayer requests via email. I mean it... just stop. In fact, I want you to stop sending them to just about everyone else, too. I know that you care about these people... these needs you send my way. And you want others to know, to care, to pray. You want to feel a sense of connection, of community with a larger group of people, people who may, even just for a moment, feel some of the same concern you are feeling. But the truth is, there is a cost to what you are doing.

 

Kevin Bacon Needs Your Prayers!

It used to be so much easier. Once upon a time we lived in smaller communities, we knew fewer people. We had a finite number of people we were responsible to know, to care for, to pray for. News from around the world came infrequently and often late. The world was just smaller.

 

When tragedy struck someone we knew, we had the ability to stop, to help... to care. We could keep up with someone's progress, contribute to their healing, pray for their well-being. All that has changed now.

 

The problem is that we are too connected. It's so easy now to forward our needs to literally thousands of people, people connected to us only in the most tangential, six-degrees-of-Kevin Bacon kind of ways; people we will never meet, people we will never thank for praying. People who should, in fact, be busy caring for others.

 

Now stop... I know what you are thinking. Yes, we'll meet those people someday in heaven. Yes, we should care, and it takes so little time to just throw up a quick prayer. But don't you understand?  That's not how we are supposed to pray

 

Jesus talked about persistent prayers, heartfelt prayers... prayers that welled up out of the soul like cries for help from a widow with nothing and no one, who's about to lose what little she does have because of injustice and an uncaring judge. Prayer that goes hand in hand with tears. Prayer that feels like we're trying to knock down the very doors of heaven.

 

You've Got Tragedy!

I sit at my desk all day long and sometimes it gets so bad, I just delete them without even reading them. Ding! Cancer. Ding! Car wreck. Ding! Lost job. There have been days when I have received so many prayer requests from so many places I begin to think that God must be asleep. Maybe He lost interest and looked away and now the world is slowly veering off into a ditch. I hate feeling that way.

 

The problem is that when tragedy strikes anywhere in the world, we instantly know about it.  And the cost is that we are being asked to care about more and more every day, and so find ourselves caring less and less. I can care a good deal about ten people. I can remember them, their problems, their praises very well. For 100 people I can still care, I can still pray, but less effectively. For a thousand? For a million? I try the arrow prayers. I shoot up a quick  "God please work in this situation." And then I hit delete. And I'm pretty sure God says "Is that the extent of your caring in this situation? Why bother?" 

 

We were made to carry each others burdens but we were never made to carry the burdens of so many. Why do we believe that a thousand quick prayers from people who don't know the individuals or the situation are somehow better than ten from people who really care, can follow up, can actually be involved? And if you think that the two are not mutually exclusive, let me tell you that they are.

 

I know you want to have certain people that will pray intensely and then send those requests out to the larger mass who may say a quick prayer and then forget about it. But those ten people that you know are loving, caring prayer warriors... their inboxes are being flooded everyday too. The people you know and depend on to care for you are being bombarded with requests to care for people from all over the world, and so necessarily can care less for you.

 

Prayer That Availeth Much

I don't want a thousand people praying for me. I want ten. But I want those ten to pray with such fervor, such intensity, such persistence... I want them to love me enough to pray without ceasing and I want to pray for them the same way. I want to take their requests and bang on the doors of heaven until God hears, until He answers. And then, together, we can offer thanks. We can throw a party because God answered, because God intervened.

 

Do you have anyone that's praying for you that way? Why not? Maybe it's because they're too busy trying to care for too many. Maybe they're hesitant about committing to that kind of prayer because they know that it may mean intentionally leaving some other prayers unsaid. But just maybe it's because you haven't asked. Perhaps there are some people in your life who would step up and stand in the gap for you if you just asked them to.

 

We should be people of prayer. We should even care for others outside of our immediate circles. We should pray for people around the world when needs are made known to us. And even more than prayer, we should act when we can, when God gives us the resources to step into a situation and be a part of the solution. But we should be careful that we do not so burden others with our needs, with our requests for them to care about us that we make it a practical impossibility for them to care about anyone.

 

So, if you'd just think long and hard before hitting that forward button, I'd appreciate it.

   

Comments

[Ricky Spears]

I'm not a pastor, but a Sunday School teacher and I can certainly relate to this. The truth is that I've been carefully culling prayer requests for some time now--I just don't tell the requestors that I'm doing it. I monitor our church email prayer list for the ones that are within my close realm of influence and those are the only ones I seriously pray for. Sometimes I've felt guilty for not even offering up a quick, "Lord, I lift up _____ to you and ask that your will be done..." But you are right--God doesn't want that kind of prayer either. Thanks for sharing!

[Kai]

Bob, I am surprised this post has so few comments. It is an insightful post. I hope more will read it because it is an interesting challenge to an established 'sacred cow', but I am not certain it succeeds.

Can't you throw the old and tired (but effective, which is why it is overused, right?) "one starfish back into the sea" sermon illustration back at this and make it stick though?

[IP]

I don't know enough about the nature of God to know if he weighs requests and petitions in that way though it's easy for me to assume that he does since the type of prayer you describe seems akin to rubbing Buddha's belly or keeping a rabbit's foot. What I love about this post though is the HONESTY. How ridiculously refreshing. I don't know if it's right or wrong, or somewhere in between but I do know in my 20's, I was a 'drop everything for someone in need' kind of person and felt like all such encounters were divine appointments, hand-delivered by God as an opportunity to demonstrate his love. Now in my 30's, I am burned out. I avoid going deep with people because I eschew the emotional energy and the sense of obligation to address a need once I am aware of it. I think I had the wrong idea in my 20's, that _I_ could make things better instead of recognizing that the work in their hearts could not be addressed by anyone but them.

[Ryan]

I love the post - it is exactly what I have thought since I became the admin at my church. Where in the Bible does it say that having more people pray for something will increase the odds of God "coming through for you". Rather than sending the email to the church, just pray yourself, afterall, you are closer to the situation. I came to my "aha" moment when we received a prayer request for a relative of a church member to find their lost cat (and it wasn't on behalf of a child either). I know God cares, but 1000 strangers who have never met you don't. Keep your request between you and God.