I don’t know about you – but I’ve been on both sides of this. There’s been times when someone I know is going through something tough and before I know it, I’m promising to say a prayer for them.
On the flip side, I have had my share of tough situations and have asked others to please pray – even very recently when a close family member suffered cardiac arrest. You bet I was asking everyone to pray and so thankful that many responded with “Praying.” She survived against odds of less than 10%. I believe God heard our prayers. Of course, Him hearing our prayers doesn’t always have a happy ending, but in this case, we witnessed a Divine and outright miracle.
My problem is, more often than not, saying we’ll pray for someone can simply be comforting words we speak to someone having it rough. It doesn’t mean we forget about our friend completely – but we don’t actually “pray” for them either as we said we’d do.
So why not? If I’m honest with myself, I’ve promised to pray for someone and gotten busy and forgotten do it. ? That sucks. Because I believe that prayer connects us to the Person with power to change things. Prayer is powerful. It’s a direct line to our Creator.
I just think if we are gonna throw around promises that are connected to the Heavens, maybe we should actually follow through or perhaps just not say it at all. Otherwise we’re actually cheapening the phrase and making it an empty promise, a passing sentimental phrase with no depth. Over a period of time, this slowly creates obstacles of indifference. But even worse, we could possibly miss out on being a part of a truly awesome miracle, simply because we chose to “say it, and not pray it.”
