Sunday, February 11, 2007

Stupid Things I Think about While Praying...

So, this morning in Church during the "Prayers of the People, Form IV" my mind wandered. Now, before anyone goes 'ahah, proof the deadness and woodeness of that silly old liturgical Christianity!' let me say one thing. Everyone wanders off during prayer, and the beauty of the liturgy is that it can go on without me. I'm not conjuring up spiritual feelings and fervor when they just aren't there. I can come with my humanity, my broken-ness, my sinfulness, (and even occasionally, some HONEST fervor), And still the real worship of God moves forward, even when I don't because of my weakness. The liturgy takes bringing glory to God off my shoulders. The liturgy takes into account my weakness, and makes a way for a less than perfect shmoe like me to know myself in my sinfulness, deal with my sin, know myself as an object of God's love, and then to give Him glory and thanks, and receive Him into myself in fellowship through the Eucharist, and through the Spirit...

More importantly, when I do check back in, I still know whats going on, and I'm not fishing around for some hyper-spiritual mish-mash to recover my appearances of holiness.

Anyway...that being said, what I really wanted to talk about is how much I am amazed at my own weirdness. This morning, during prayer, after the lady that was leading us in prayer (I was doing good up until that point, staying on the ball...) asked God to 'help us Lord to use the resources of the earth rightly, to your glory and to serve others...' my mind began it's first little trip. I though, 'mmm, I like using the the earth...hiking is fun...what if I go hiking in the Southwest someday....what about rattlesnakes? What if one crawls into my sleeping bag for warmth? What would I do?" And so it went....I thought out the options: a fast exit, hoping the little bastard wouldn't get a hold of me before I got out. Perhaps I could slip my arm out quietly and push down on the outside of the sleeping bag between my self and the snake so I could get out with the snake pinned to one side. Maybe I could just go the 'direct' route and keep a big stick near the head of my sleeping bag to whack it to death...

I came to somewhere near the end around where the lady was asking God to have mercy on those who had died and take them into His presence. Then I heard my own voice...
"Is that really want I sound like? Man, I must be distracting...I hope I'm not distracting Nathan....shit, I'm distracting myself...where are we again?"

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

HA. You were not distracting me. I was probably off in mental Guam.

8:57 AM  
Blogger xcwomac said...

Ha ha oh geez

10:58 PM  
Blogger Jon said...

well, first of all, you could trust Jesus' words in Mark 16.8 about poisonous snakes, unless you don't think the longer end of Mark is legitimate, then... well... you're screwed. but at least you might be able to get last rites! liturgy rocks! :)

2:14 PM  
Blogger Joshua said...

Troy -
I hadn't gotten around to reading this whole this till just now. You are hillarious. Incidentally, I was in the Choir loft, so you certainly didn't distract me.
Cheers Man

9:54 AM  

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