When you pray.... just think how it would be if...

After a few decades the weekly Men's Bible Study still opens and closes with shared prayer, whether 2 or 3 show up or a full table of 9 or 10 are present. Thinking about the range of topics that some of the men voiced during the preamble, "well, what should we pray about today," and reflecting on the words spoken in the course of bowed heads for the praying itself, there seemed to be a recurring intention or purpose that emerged sometimes. Underneath the petitions, praise, and thanks on matters of healing/health for bodies and for spirits, including specific persons and specific struggles, there was an overarching or underlying urgency that God please draw each person closer in stronger relationship and sweeter harmony; that hard hearts remain soft and open to being touched by events in one's own life, as well as in responding with feeling to the events in others lives, whether personally or professionally known or ones farther away whom we do not know closely.

In sum, the bottom line for all of these prayers and all of these decades might be a request to seek God's Will and do his bidding; to listen with care to the direction for one's decisions; to rely on one's heart when looking across the world and when weighing decisions that affect self or one's neighbor. In short, the prayers keep coming back to God is Love; we aspire to be more like God/Jesus and thus overflow in expressing (agape) love of others; and in achieving this posture and outlook in our engagement of the places we find ourselves, thereby to grow deeper connection and stronger feeling with God's Will.

Suppose for a moment that these recurring, ultimate intentions are carried out; that more and more people successfully navigate their lives and relationships by leading with their hearts, not greed, fear, (self) loathing, or some other strong force. How would household life differ; congregational aspirations change; wider community habits and responses to crisis or stress by altered; indeed, how would state and (inter)national decisions proceed differently to different purposes/outcomes to the way things run now with reference to GNP, quarterly profits for shareholders, and externalized costs that a company leaves for future generations to clean up.