I DON’T TRUST YOU (and my unspoken prayer request proves it)

I’m a firm believer in community. I harp on it quite often within the church. But my wife scoffs at me because I have a hard time practicing what I preach. She’s an extrovert, so connecting within groups energizes her. I’m an introvert, so community can at times be challenging. Pouring into others and connecting with unfamiliar faces takes an immense amount of energy so I have to work hard at it.

In fact, often times we expend way more energy than needed in Christian community because we put on a show. Everyone has to dress just right, speak just right, smell just right, and give just the right amount in the offering. Church can easily (and often does) become a place where no one truly sees anyone for who they really are. One common practice has always highlighted this for me:

UNSPOKEN PRAYER REQUESTS.

In my church setting we often take prayer requests. This also involves asking if anyone has an “unspoken” prayer request. This confuses me for several reasons. First, if you speak the fact that you have an unspoken prayer request, doesn’t that technically make it a spoken prayer request? So once you’ve spoken it, it’s no longer unspoken, which negates the entire question that brought forth the speaking of the request in the first place. It’s sort of like the whole grandfather time-travel paradox thing.

But the second difficulty I find is when I see how many hands go up when the invitation for unspoken prayer requests is given. I guess saying you have an unspoken request is better than the truth, which is: “I have a prayer request I’m not willing to share because I don’t trust anyone in this room.” Perhaps that’s how we should start asking for unspoken prayer requests: “Does anyone have a request you don’t want to share out loud because you don’t trust us to keep it quiet and not judge you? (Someone please try this and report back to me!)

But this is what we so often become—a community of people who attend church services, picnics, business meetings, and potlucks together, but who know little about one another, nor care to. We do church as church should be done, and we then live as we choose to live. The body of Christ can sometimes become more like a broken Lego character with a head here and a leg there, and never the two shall meet.

I understand we are all flawed. I understand that truly trusting everyone is a difficult, if not impossible, task. But I’ve always thought unspoken prayer requests simply highlight the fact that we really don’t know how to properly function within the body of Christ, and we certainly don’t know how to truly trust one another.

So, I won’t be taking any unspoken prayer requests anytime soon, but odds are, I’ll continue giving them. I guess that means I’m part of the problem.