Praying Hypertext

How often, when you are reading an online document or webpage, do you find a link that leads to a related term? You follow the link, fully intending to return, but you find more links. Gradually you diverge further and further from your original quest or task, until eventually you can no longer remember what you wanted. Even if you did, you might be hard pressed to find it again. And, what do you do with all the marvellous things you discovered along the way?

Does this remind you of many so called "prayer meetings"? Each person prays their list, while the next person desperately tries to find something they can pray which hasn't yet been mentioned, at the same time trying to listen to the prayer. Or, you may want to add to a prayer, but someone gets in first and changes the subject! And so it goes on, around the world and back again a few times. If you wanted to agree with something and try to drag the prayer back to a previous point, you are just sure that people are thinking, "Where has he or she been?"

For me, often the only thing lacking in such meetings is prayer itself!

A sure sign, for me, that a group is listening to God when they pray is that there will be only one agenda, and the prayers that are prayed will not be those that the participants had in mind when they came to the meeting. After all, are we wanting to pray God's own heart, or do we just want to look spiritual? Who is fooled by this? Cetrtainly not God!