A Thanksgiving for Prayer

Prayer has been one of the hardest things for me to understand, as a new Christian. I keep circling around it, trying to figure out how to approach it, understand its place in my life. One of the things I’ve realized lately is the extent to which prayer draws me toward community. This meditation, which came out of a conversation with my priest after Easter, is about the experience of being on the receiving end of intercessory prayer. I wrote it specifically for my church, St. Michael’s-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, but I hope you’ll find that it has something to say to a broader audience as well.

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A year ago on Good Friday, I wasn’t among you. None of you knew me; I’d never set foot at St. Michael’s. But though you didn’t know it, when all of you knelt in prayer during the service, you were praying for me. You see, part of that service goes straight to where I was, one year ago:

Let us pray for all who have not received the Gospel of Christ; For those who have never heard the word of salvation… For those hardened by sin or indifference; For the contemptuous and the scornful… That God will open their hearts to the truth, and lead them to faith and obedience.

Last year at this time, I wasn’t a Christian – though I was on the road to becoming one. For thirty-one years I had been a very atheistic agnostic, but in the Lenten season of 2006, all that had begun to change. One of the watershed days was Easter Sunday. It was the day I consciously acknowledged the pull I felt toward God, and dared to say – is it Christ who acts in me? It would be a month later, in mid-May, that I would accept the crucified and risen Lord Jesus as my Savior, but it was at Easter that the balance tipped, subtly but irrevocably, toward Christian faith.

When the congregation of St. Michael’s petitioned the Lord last Good Friday, your prayers directly addressed who I was and what I was struggling with. I wanted to know what was true – that was, in fact, the question that got me started on the path to conversion. I was trying to break through years of cynicism and indifference. I had started to hear the word of salvation, but I didn’t know what to think about it. I didn’t know Him at all…

…but all of you were praying to Him for me:

Merciful God… Have compassion on all who do not know you as you are revealed in your Son Jesus Christ; let your Gospel be preached with grace and power to those who have not heard it; turn the hearts of those who resist it…

And so it was. Our most merciful God reached out to me, through the grace-filled witness of one of His faithful people; He turned my heart toward Him; and He guided me to St. Michael’s where I have been able to grow in the faith and receive love and support as I start my walk in the Christian life.

This Good Friday, as I knelt in prayer with all of you, my heart filled up with such gratitude and joy that I can’t even speak it without choking up. I am so very blessed to be here. Today I offer thanksgiving for your prayers, and I praise God for His grace, alive and well and working out there in the world.

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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