Becoming the Answers to Our Prayers

Sitting in chapel today, as we talked about and prayed through issues that place children worldwide at risk, I started noticing an interesting trend.

My classmates who were leading the chapel had focused in on four “risk factors” that they felt are the biggest issues facing children today; poverty, oppressive rituals and traditions, slavery, and war or other forms of violence. They gave equal attention to each of the issues and personalized each one with stories about particular children.

Any World Vision advocate would have been proud.

But, when we started praying corporately, it was as if all but the middle two issues faded completely off of the map. It almost seemed as if we were hesitant to pray for a solution to poverty or war.

In some ways, it makes sense. Growing up in the Church, you hear verses about how the poor will always be there, and warnings that there will be wars and rumors of wars, maybe so much so that we have given up on those issues. Relegated them to the back corner of things that “just happen” and we have no power over.

Some quiet part of our brains whispers that it won’t do any good anyways, and another part agrees. That other part, somewhere deep in our emotional hub, would rather spare the relatively quick burst of emotional energy needed to become temporarily angry over the issue of sex trafficking or FGM than sustain the intellectual muscle required to reexamine our paradigms of poverty and violence.

Making that jump from an emotional response to an intellectual one is hard work, and not something that come naturally, maybe more so because we know, in that deep, gut level sort of way, that, if we really, truly pray for solutions to poverty or violence, we might find ourselves becoming the answers to those prayers.

Which, leads to an interesting question.

When we talk about issues of social justice, are we really willing to be the answers that we are looking for, or are we just talking in order to appease our own sense of guilt?

Is there a purpose to knowledge if it comes without action?