Pray Like a Girl

The last thing I hear every night before I drift into sleep is my wife’s prayers. It’s a good way to end a day. Last night, she prayed this: “God, if we do not see tomorrow, you have given us more in fifty years than many people will see in an entire lifetime. We are blessed and we are grateful.” This from a woman who has walked through some deep valleys with me and is currently the primary caregiver for her aging parents – a role that puts some hard miles on a person’s soul right quickly. And yet she is grateful.

This post is not about women praying in church. To begin with, I reject that formulation. It makes it sound like church is a place on a map or a date on the calendar rather than the living, loving body of people redeemed by the blood of Jesus. Where else, how else can Christian women pray except “in the church?”

And, if you hold to a more traditional view of women’s roles in corporate worship, I’m not going to try and argue you out of it. At least not in this post. Having grown up (and gratefully so) in the Church of Christ, I understand that position well. You and I can disagree on any number of issues and still represent Jesus to the world here and now. In fact, our disagreement provides a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate what real unity in Christ actually looks like. Unity in our culture these days basically means you have to agree with me on everything or you will be shamed, shunned and exiled. That’s not unity; that’s conformity.

But I digress. (Which is exactly what “issues” like this do – they sidetrack us off the main thing.)

Hannah

I am not the first to be blessed by a woman’s prayer. In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah was silently pouring out her heart to God. When God answered her prayer with a son, she named him Samuel. It means heard by God. When she prays in chapter 2, she is no longer silent. Everyone hears Hannah’s prayer. It is visceral, edgy and honest. One second she is wagging her finger at her enemies, the next she is pointing to heaven celebrating God: “There is no one holy like the Lord, there is no one besides you, there is no rock like our God.” God’s answer to Hannah’s prayer was Israel’s greatest prophet.

Esther

Haman just sounds like a bad guy. He’s what happens when a sizeable ego gets matched with a small soul. Haman hatched a plan to annihilate the hated Jews. And his plan might have succeeded had it not been for Esther – the Jewish beauty queen who believed in prayer. When she learned of Haman’s plot, she asked her cousin, Mordecai, to gather all the Jews in the capital to fast and pray for her. “I and my attendants will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.” God’s answer to Esther’s prayer was a nation delivered.

Lydia

There was no synagogue in Philippi when Paul and Silas made their first visit there, (Acts 16). So on the Sabbath, they went down to the river expecting to find a place for some quiet devotion. They met a woman named Lydia, a worshipper of God, who had gathered with other women to pray. As she listened to Paul talk about Jesus, God opened her heart and she and her household were baptized. There is no record in Scripture that reveals the content of Lydia’s prayers, but we can know the results. God’s answer to Lydia’s prayers was a new soul, a new church and the gospel’s first foothold in Europe.

Mary

In the coming weeks, we will hear Mary’s prayer either read or sung in worship; The Magnificat, from Luke 1. It is a prayer or hymn of praise that Mary spoke when she visited her cousin, Elizabeth. Decades older than Mary, Elizabeth was finally expecting her first child. They were a curious couple – one woman well beyond child bearing years, the other a virgin, yet both thinking about what color to paint the nurseries. God has always moved in mysterious ways. And Mary’s prayer was a response to what God was about to do for the world through the child growing in her womb.

When we want to know how to pray, we rightly turn to the prayer of Jesus in Matthew 6. But I wonder – is it possible that when Jesus was a boy, his first lessons in prayer were learned from his mother?