The tradition of using a string of beads or rope knots in prayer is an ancient tradition and a ritual shared by many faith traditions around the globe. The common connection is the ability to give structure to personal prayer devotion. It offers a way to remind and revisit various areas of focus and concern. Repeated rituals can be powerful as they help shape our habits. Please use the image of the Prayer Beads above and the Guided Meditations below to enhance your prayer life.
Finding the Words by Catherine Kopp
Since 2009, each November I have taken part in National Novel Writing Month. As part of this event, individuals across the United States and around the world strive to write fifty thousand words over the course of thirty days.
Writing is like prayer in that everyone has their own approach to it. Some of us come to the page early in the morning while others can only write late at night; and still others steal a few moments here and there throughout the day to get our words in. Some of us begin with just an idea and let the creativity flow as it will, similar to those of us who approach prayer as a continuing conversation with God. There are also people who require more structure, who plot out every beat of their stories during October so when they sit down at the keyboard in November, they know exactly where they are going. This is what the prayer beads remind me of - having a set outline for what to say next.
That's not saying that one way or another is easier. The words, when they come, aren't perfectly precious little bits of prose that float out onto the page. They are messy and sometimes feel like they are being pulled out of us, but they are part of what we need to say at that moment in time.
The beauty of National Novel Writing Month is that while each of us works on our own story, we have opportunities to come together. Being in a room or a virtual space with twenty other people plugging away on their keyboards is a way to realize that we're not in this alone. Sometimes, one of us is struggling to find a particular word, a character name, or a way out of a scenario that we've painted our characters into. At times like these, we can go to the rest of the group for help. Someone is usually there with an answer that can get us typing again.
When we are struggling to find the words to pray, we can also realize that we're not in this alone. As we come to the last bead in our prayer chain, we are given the opportunity to pray the words that Jesus taught us, simple, yet powerful words, given as a gift to the disciples and passed down through generations. We look to Jesus and we find the words. “Our Creator, who art in Heaven...”
Letting Go by Bill Hurst
I may be the least qualified person in our community to write an article on letting go and letting God. When I think of losses I’ve suffered, I don’t remember ever giving those things up easily. I only let go after doing everything I knew to hold on. My losses are pried from my hands, not let go. As for “letting God,” while I am a person of faith and have been for much of my life, I am also a person of control. Why “let God” when I have the ability to do it myself? Don’t I know what I need? Didn’t God give me the intelligence to figure my way through my own problems? I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our society celebrates self-sufficiency. We love stories of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, overcoming difficulty and pain and making it on their own. We may passingly credit God, but we celebrate the individual effort.
So, what am I to do with this idea of letting go and letting God? I’ve suffered losses, big and small. In every case, my response was to try to hang on and fix the situations myself. If God was involved, it was a begging prayer not an honest willingness to trust. But as I look back, I realize that despite my efforts at control and unwillingness to give things to God, God has been there anyway.
When I gave up my freedom and ability to make many choices for myself and lived in fear of where I would be or what would happen, God showed me Jeremiah 29:5-7. It told me to flourish wherever I was and quit believing that God was limited to a particular place or situation. After my divorce, I was drawn to a new marriage to a person who continues to teach me about unconditional love. Lost family, friends, and relationships gave way to new, often unlikely, friends and the discovery of a family of choice that loves and nurtures me.
During my recent illness, I’ve discovered a new awareness and empathy for others who are suffering. Rather than focusing exclusively on myself, I realize that there are dozens of people in our community who need my prayer and support. Hundreds of people in our area undergo medical treatments and millions in our world face sickness and death daily.
I may not like letting go and letting God, but I realize that without God, I’d be nowhere. God has led me, taught me, shown me, and kept me in ways that I have often failed to see until much later (if at all). In order for me to see God’s actions, though, it requires that I finally let go and recognize that I need help. I can’t fix everything myself. I must let go. I must let God.
You are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Christine White
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken pieces with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. The result is a unique work of art made even more beautiful with bands of the precious metal running through it. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as valuable history rather than something to disguise and hide.
Just as Kintsugi makes broken pottery into a unique, one-of-a-kind new piece of pottery, unconditional love takes the broken pieces of our lives and transforms us into someone new. The unconditional love that we receive is the gold that puts us back together. We no longer need to hide our cracks but can recognize them as parts of our history that have been made whole.
I have found this type of unconditional love at MCCGSL. I have seen people broken by the conditional love of family, friends, and churches, transformed when they realize that God loves them as they are, not in spite of who they are. Where do we get the ability to love unconditionally? Accepting the unconditional love offered by God gives us the ability to unconditionally love and forgive both ourselves and others. In the book of Psalms, David writes in chapter 139 verses 13 and 14, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well.”
Pray Without Ceasing by Wes Shirley
Music will save your life. That’s what choir director James Cleveland told Aretha Franklin as a child and later as an adult when she was struggling with her self-described demons. He encouraged her with the power of prayer to face down those demons and take back her life. Whether you call them life’s unexpected curveballs, challenges, demons or darkness, sometimes we only remember to turn to God in prayer when we need help. I struggle with this as well. My hope is to use our prayer beads to remind me to keep in constant prayer during all times of life. This includes when I feel God’s blessings shining on me as well as the difficult times when I am lost in the darkness.
The idea of praying without ceasing throughout each day can seem overwhelming, so try to remember there are many ways to lift things up to God. Prayer takes many different forms – it can be a song, it can be a kind act or good deed, quiet reflective time, holding a string of beads/prayer knots, or whatever prayer means to you. I’m going to challenge myself, as well as you, to look at prayer in a different way and embark on a commitment to making it part of your daily routine (if it’s not already).
We all know God answers prayers and does so in several different ways. A few days after I’d already submitted my first draft of this article for the eBlast, God provided me with yet another example of how sometimes our prayers are answered unexpectedly. During my Friday morning prayer time (again not always a routine of mine just yet), I asked God to help me say the right things for a work presentation due that day. Within a few minutes, a completely new set of work-related circumstances popped up leaving me panicked and stressed. In the end, God was able to help guide me through the situation and helped me realize God knows what we need and provides that, despite the fact it might be different from what we think we need or from what we might ask for through prayer.
We have some amazing prayer warriors in this church family and whether you know it or not, they’re constantly doing what Aretha Franklin tells us in her hit song, “I Say a Little Prayer (For You).” It reminds us how important prayer is throughout our daily lives, from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep at night. In James Cleveland’s final days battling heart failure, respiratory problems left him unable to sing and made it difficult to talk. On the last Sunday before his death, he told the church, “If I don’t see you again and if I don’t sing again, I’m a witness to the fact the Lord answers prayer. He let my voice come back to me this morning to praise with you all.”
My Faith Has Been Shaped by What I Sing by Ron White
As a young person, songs like “Amazing Grace” carried me through the pain of life, helping me to know God and remain hopeful. When I was 12 years old, my hero and role model, the man I loved with all my heart, my beloved maternal grandfather died when his tractor overturned. At his funeral, we sang “The Old Rugged Cross.” I cried and was comforted. For decades, when I heard that song, tears welled up in my eyes.
I had just turned 15 when the assassination of President Kennedy rocked my world. In the next few years, more of my heroes would be gunned down, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy the most prominent; but many more died who I longed to know better, among them Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. Dion released “Abraham, Martin and John” in 1968, a song that has long comforted me. I never lost my faith that God was present. My faith, however, grew and matured as my understanding of God did the same. One of my two best friends, Larry, disappeared the night Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were gunned down, December 4, 1969. His body was found weeks later. In my grief as I had always done since I was a boy, I would hole up all alone and play the music that helped me grieve through those times and get my joy back.
In my 30’s, I realized that the lessons about God that I learned as a boy were impermanent. As my faith was rocked, music rescued me once again. In 1990, Carly Simon wrote and released the little known song that has been my own personal theme ever since, “Life Is Eternal.” A couple of my favorite lines are “But just how long and who knows…how and where my spirit will go. Will it soar like Jazz on a saxophone or evaporate on a breeze?” and “Here on earth I'm a lost soul ever trying to find my way back home. Maybe that's why each new star is born, expanding heaven's room, eternity in bloom. And will I see you up in that heaven in all its light will I know you're there? Will we say the things that we never dared? If wishing makes it so,
won't you let me know…that life is eternal and love is immortal and death is only a horizon. Life is eternal as we move into the light and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight." I encourage you to listen to it on You Tube If you have a favorite theme song for your life, revisit it. You may never stop listening…just like me.
God & Silence by Darla Wickard
When I was a little girl, about 5, I took a walk along a small dirt path with my grandfather, enjoying the sun and all the lively activity of nature, birds chirping and squirrels running up and down trees. It was in southern Indiana where my grandparents had a small piece of property with a few acres and a very old cabin, so they could spend some weekends getting away. It was also very close to where my grandmother grew up on a road known as $40 Road, because that was how much it had cost when it was named, or so I’m told.
So, things were simple and straightforward in this little place off the beaten path, and it was a perfect place of quiet, being unplugged from the world for a little while. During that walk with my grandfather, I watched how relaxed and completely comfortable he was. He would alternate between telling me the names of the animals and the trees and then just walk quietly looking around and smiling. My grandfather seemed connected to the outdoors, the natural setting, and for me, in some way, he seemed very close to God. He showed a kind of contentment I didn’t fully understand at age 5, but I knew he looked really happy and peaceful, like he had all the time in the world. He seemed to engage in every aspect of the sounds of nature while staying calm and receptive to the sounds of me, as I asked him a million questions about a spider I was chasing. That day my grandfather showed me how God was everywhere and right there with me, naturally walking beside me. To imagine now 50+ years later, I can still hear my grandfather’s gentle voice on that walk and see his smile, is incredible.
My grandfather’s sense of peace and awareness with God in nature has stayed with me and has encouraged a practice of mindful silence. Taking a walk has always been therapeutic and calming. I start out thinking about all the concerns, problems, to do’s, or activities going on at the time, but then I reach a point where I look up and around again at the sky, trees, houses, etc. and become more engaged in my surroundings as I let go of the pressing things for a while. It is almost like a refresh of appreciation for God being with me on my journey, wherever it takes me. I find a sense of balance and reach a place of mindful silence – to just listen, observe and be present. This same sense of well-being happens when I sit on the back deck at home or when I’m fortunate enough walk along a beach watching the ocean. All the natural amazing things that God has created come into view better when I am truly present. I feel God’s love while breathing in the smell of the ocean, looking at the fog rolling away from the Golden Gate Bridge, or watching a deer eating acorns in my front yard. It’s a sense of connection without words.
Mindful silence in practice has been valuable in my meditation and prayer life with God. Being silent may at first seem like being lonely or detached. I often want a direct response, some note of recognition to reassure me that I’ve been heard, understood, or cared about when communicating with others and with God. It is difficult to wait for a reply, especially in today’s immediate feedback driven world. So, I really appreciate that during that walk years ago, my grandfather had the patience and interest to show me that relaxing conversation along with natural quiet time can be shared and meaningful. These days, in my yoga classes, when the instructor talks about self-awareness, all participants practice a time of meditation and are encouraged to let go in their own comfortable mat-space. There is a shared, connected sense of well-being with others without words. I have found a similar experience in shared prayer with others, after a discussion followed by prayer and brief silence – as we breathe and support one another in response to holding hands in a circle. There is a welcoming sense of stillness as a positive flow of energy moves through that togetherness.
More surprisingly, I shared a time of mindful silence with a group during a Lenten Zoom meeting last spring. We all agreed that we actually felt comfortable being present together in quiet meditation. This was amazing since we joined in from different cities, states, and countries, often meeting one another for the first time, and each of us only viewing one another within our small “home” squares on-screen. In this technology-friendly mindful silence, there was a sense of peace and togetherness I would never have thought possible without an in-person face-to-face experience.
The times in my life when I’ve been the most stressed, unsure, and almost convinced that God wasn’t responding were times when I couldn’t stop the noise of everything else. In those times, God’s assurance has often come as an almost too calm and comforting voice for me to initially accept because the situation felt overwhelming. When I have found the space for mindful silence to quiet that noise, alone or shared in a group, I have been able to listen to God more effectively and pray more fully to express my thoughts, feelings, and concerns. When I can breathe, be more present, and lean into a place of stillness, I can engage in what God has to tell me, and thankfully, God’s love through calm guidance and reassurance has often brought me back to center, recognizing God is naturally walking beside me.
Reflections by Al Hinch
It was 1963 and St. Louis broke ground on the world-famous Arch symbolizing “The Gateway to the West.” While many eyes were on the skies watching this seemingly miraculous structure come to be, picket signs circulated around its base to bring attention to unfair, racially biased hiring practices of the monument construction team. It was the start of our own movement for jobs and freedom in St. Louis as others gathered in Washington, DC.
Around the time Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King stood in front of the Reflection Pool, I stood in front of Jefferson Bank raising my voice and taking up space advocating for Black tellers to be hired at the bank. This was my first taste of activism. Soon after, I would be hired as the first Black nurse at Lutheran Medical Center in the Southside of St. Louis. It was in this job; my activism changed its shape. Rather than picket, I found myself correcting people who got me and the only other Black employee confused or learning to not be upset when a patient asked for a white nurse. Quickly, I had to decide and choose to be a part of a solution by maintaining an open mind, offering grace, and learning to see shades of grey in every situation.
The same is true at church. I have been a part of MCC for over a decade. I am moved by the values we proclaim and spirit of the church. Yet, my experience has not been that of the warm, radical hospitality we often talk about in our predominately white congregation. It is the subtle things, not being invited to lunch when someone sitting next to me is. Not being recognized, hugged, or getting confused with someone else. I’ve decided to let go and let God come in anyway, because God always does.
You see, we get immune to what is around us, we are accustomed to that which is most similar to our own selves. Have you noticed the experience others have around you, especially those with a different skin color? Are you comfortable with that? These are the questions that desegregation demands of us. This is a part of wrestling for the dream and being the visible, vibrant place, we want to be – the place God is calling us to be. So, let us all wrestle against our biases while teaching one another to see in shades of grey. Surely, God will meet us there too.
Reach Out & Touch Someone by Michael Neuf
Where do I find God in time of change? Well, that’s a trick question. Ya see, times are always changing. The real question is where do I find God. The answer is simple. Everywhere! So, let’s narrow the field a little by putting the question into the context of Sunday’s scripture reading from Isaiah 1:16-17: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”
Taking into consideration the sermon series “The Faith We Sing – Music of the 60’s” brings me to a song recorded by one of my favorite musical groups/artists – Diana Ross. The song title is powerful to me – “Reach out and Touch” and the lyrics give me examples of how to follow the words of Isaiah above: Reach out and touch somebody’s hand. Make this world a better place, if you can. Take a little time out of your busy day to give encouragement to someone who’s lost the way (just try). Or would I be talking to a stone if I asked you to share a problem that’s not your own (oh no). We can change things if we start giving. Why don’t you reach out and touch somebody’s hand? If you see an old friend on the street and he’s down. Remember his shoes fit your feet (just try). Try a little kindness and you’ll see it’s something that comes very naturally (oh yeah). We can change things if we start giving. Why don’t you (why don’t you) reach out and touch somebody’s hand."
I find God speaking to me through the passionate music and meaningful lyrics of this song in a way that I can hear the message loud and clear. I need to hear it repeatedly. Be more compassionate, drop the sarcasm, and be kind. We can change the world to be a better place one loving encounter at a time. May it be so.
The Power of Love to Overcome Fear by Ron White
What is your greatest concern right now? Are you in fear of economic loss? Do you fear the loss of the person or thing that has steadied your life for so long? Do you fear the feeling that your health is slipping away? Or fear major changes in your life that you can’t grasp the ability to prevent? Everywhere we turn, including when we read certain stories in the Bible, messages about fear invade our consciousness. Fear, deny it as we will, is one of the most prominent features of life. Fear is a deep seated feeling that can trigger myriad other negative feelings - shyness, insecurity, self-doubt, self-criticism, and many more. Fear can also be a set of actions, a verb, a way of living life…in fear.
How do you address your fears? Do you deny them and run from the feelings as fast as you can? Or, difficult as it is to make yourself, do you face them head on? Impossible circumstances, whatever they are, can create fear in us that can rage out of control. When fear is not in control, it is very hard for us to hear to God's instruction "Don't be afraid.”
What reassures us in the midst of great worry or fear? The lesson that God teaches us about how to overcome our fear is staring us right in the face. The Bible doesn’t stop at the admonition “Fear not.” It teaches us that “Perfect love casts out fear.” Perfect love, eh? Yeah, that may seem like an insurmountable objective to achieve…all by yourself. But, you are not alone. Never. Ever. God is with you. So are the people who love you no matter what. The struggle is to accept that love, even imperfect love, and let it help us control our fears. Love is more than a noun, more than the deep feeling that books, television, and movies make it out to be. Love is a verb, a decision you make, a set of actions that you take, a way of life that lets us take control over our fears, reducing it until it almost completely disappears. Live one day at a time trusting that God will show you the power of love.