Prayer Means Action

Everyone should hesitate before they pray for something if they are not willing to take some sort of action to help answer that prayer.

If I pray for my friend who’s sick—that God would comfort them and help them feel less alone—but I am unwilling to take action on that prayer, I am making a mockery of prayer.

In a previous post I mentioned that if you are someone who offers “thoughts and prayers” for the gun crisis in America, but aren’t lifting a “damn finger,” then God isn’t listening to those prayers.

Yes, the language is intense, but “lifting a damn finger” isn’t synonymous with becoming an activist.

What it means for you to lift a finger is going to look a lot different than what it takes for, say, Senator Cruz or Governor Abbott to lift a finger. Moreover, the intensity of hypocrisy of someone like Cruz or Abbott to say “Our thoughts and prayers are with…” and then do nothing is vastly higher than the level of hypocrisy of the average citizen who says “Thoughts and prayers” and then does nothing.

Every American citizen is responsible for who they vote for; responsible for how they handle gun storage; or talk about mental health. Every citizen can use dead-simple tools like 5calls.org or RESIST to make the step of contacting your representatives super simple.

We can’t all care for every topic all of the time. That’s exhausting and impossible. What I am suggesting, however, is for each of us to be more thoughtful in our prayer lives. We should be cautious of praying for problems we’re not currently capable of being part of the solution for.