Resolutions Day Four!

Yes, the churchy resolution is banned to the churchy blog. It just feels cozier over here! 

The resolution, I suppose, is to pray more. HOW NICE AND VAGUE! Right now I am thinking of all the training I've received in long-term and strategic planning, by which I mean I suffered through a year on the five-year-plan committee at church and maybe I could say that my OBJECTIVE is to pray more and my GOALS are to 1) go to prayer retreats/conferences and 2) receive training in prayer ministry. Or wait - did I mix up goals and objectives? I get very confused about these things, Internet. I am now on the committee IMPLEMENTING the five year plan and things get even MORE complicated. (It doesn't help when you've missed the last four meetings due to New Baby Syndrome.) 

ANYWAY! 

A frillion years ago I went to the NDCF fall retreat. As a grown up. Not only was I older than the students, I was older than all the STAFF. That right there was a mind trip. I wrote about it in my last post (which was, holy cats, over a month ago, BAD BLOGGER!) So one thing that happened there, and that I alluded to at the end of that post, was that my friend suggested I join the "prayer team" that Saturday evening at the retreat, and make myself available to pray with/for students. So for those of you who are all, "huh?" (ie: the Catholics in the crowd), the students were probably going to be pretty moved/convicted by/challenged by the Saturday evening talk, and might want to pray about it afterwards. Most of the staff were going to hang out in the back of the room and any student could approach any staff person and my FRIEND (who happens to be the boss of all these people, which is kind of awesome) was going to let ME DO IT TOO. 

Except... UM, NO WAY, LADY. Well, I have to say my first reaction was WHEE! Because... well, this is what I love. I love to pray for other people. I love to pray for people I don't know. I LOVE to just throw stuff out there and see what God does with it. And I have very few personal boundaries, you know, and I don't think it's weird at all for someone to dump all their stuff on ME, and, well, there are definitely times where I feel quite certain that This Is What I Was Made To Do. 

And YES, if you did not grow up in the NDCF or something similar or you're a very private person or what have you, this is super freaking WEIRD. I get that. TOTALLY GET THAT. But it is not weird to me. I love the prayers of the Catholic church but praying for others in this hands-on let's-see-what-God-has-to-say way is not something I ever get to do.

However! I am both smarter and humbler than I used to be (though not much) and I knew that this was not the right place for me to, say, try something out. My friend didn't think this was a big thing to offer, but it was a HUGE thing for me, and I didn't want to treat it lightly. Or turn one of these college kids into a personal experiment or something. 

So I stayed out of the way and just watched it all happen. Then later my friend and I were talking about it and she was all, "we should learn how!" Just like that. And I was all, "REALLY? We can DO that? *I* can do that?!" 

This line I've drawn between my Catholic world and my old NDCF/Protestant world is getting blurrier, or disappearing, or it was never really there in the first place. When my friend told me that one of her staff people just recently converted to Catholicism I about fell over. Seriously. But why can't I go to prayer retreats put on by Protestant ministries? Why can't I go to the NDCF winter retreat and do prayer ministry there? Why can't I learn about prayer ministry from a not-Catholic perspective? 

I don't ever think I've felt like I CAN'T, more like I SHOULDN'T. But I'm not sure why. 

I know people in both places who are super passionate about what they're doing, and I SO admire them. They're so inspiring. But I don't know ANYONE who has a foot on each side. I don't know who to emulate. I don't know who to look to for ideas or guidance. That's always hard for me, not having someone to model myself after, because if a model doesn't exist, then maybe I'm not doing the right thing. And I so want to be doing the right thing. Does that make sense?

What's nice is that my friend thinks I'm a total dork about all of this and is super excited to just try things out and see what happens and maybe we should sign up for this and maybe we can go to that and THAT is really helpful. Having someone who has all of your enthusiasm and none of your neuroses. 

But really, I DO want to learn more about prayer this year, in whichever ways I can. 

Comments

[Miriel]

Oh my gosh I totally have a frillion thoughts on this. Must email you.

[kharking]

I suspect that there are quite a lot of people with a foot in each camp but not quite willing to admit to it publicly. In the nearly two years that I've been home with the kids, I've done a lot of reading by Catholic moms and have come to appreciate their particular perspective on marriage and family that protestants, even when they do share it, tend to articulate less well. I also tend personally towards a more structured, liturgical style of corporate worship so I imagine that I would be comfortable in a Mass setting. My husband is so not an extemporaneous prayer so when we pray together, he uses printed prayers. Yet admitting that I see any value to anything Catholic might get me prayed for as drifting towards apostasy by a ridiculous number of friends and family members.
So by all means, learn what you can from people who pray the way that you want to, filter it through your knowledge of Scripture and theology and then use it to worship God and serve the people that He puts you in contact with more fully.

[Life of a Doctor's Wife]

I have great admiration for prayer, even though I don't fully understand how it works.

But I am commenting here ANYWAY because I love reading your thoughts on religion.

And - this is related, I swear! - this made me think about work. How I used to be in an internet marketing industry, and now I'm in a natural health industry. They operate very differently, but when I think of all the super cool things that are happening in IM, it seems like they can TOTALLY be applicable (in a marketing sense) in the health world. And maybe borrowing from past experience can help make my current experience even better. I guess what I'm saying is, I think that blurring the lines between two separate fields can sometimes have really great results: it can help you understand one or both of them better; it can enhance your experience with one or both; it can shine a light on something that was previously in the dark.

I'm very conscious of doing the right thing, too, so I think I can understand why blurring the lines seems scary. But it could have such wonderful results!

[Christina]

A couple of years ago my ladies Bible study did "Live A Praying Life" by Jennifer Kennedy Dean and I think it was one of the most impactful studies I've ever done. And there was a woman in our group who is Catholic and so therefore I think maybe you would like it. And man did that sound shallow. But what I was thinking was "I think Maggie and that woman would be friends" and my train of thought went from there. :) (Note, our group had real discussions where people were not afraid to disagree with eachother and/or the author, so I'm not saying the book is perfect, but maybe you'd like it)