As a pastor, I am often asked to pray for someone or for a situation. People come to me with their concerns, and I offer pastoral support.
For some reason, those requests have increased recently. Not all my prayer requests are from my congregation either. Some are from friends, family and other acquaintances. In addition, I have my own concerns that I want to pray for just because they are on my heart.
When a prayer list gets this long, it tends to become just that: a list. Prayer starts to sound like the list of call numbers on our local NPR station WAMC, which goes on for about a minute and a half, for those of you outside the listening area. Or Ben Stein reading off the attendance sheet in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
When you string together several "Please be with ____" and "please take care of ____" it loses the sense of closeness I have with these people and situations. I find myself trying new creative ways of praying for all of these people, like picking a certain prayer concern to pray for at lunch, another on my drive home, etc.
The fact that I am discontented with the length of my prayer concerns really has to do with the fact that I want these issues to be resolved. I want my dear friend to come home from Afghanistan tomorrow, I want a just resolution to legislative quarrels, I want my pregnant friend to have a smooth birth soon. I want all these things, and sometimes it seems like they are taking too long.
And so I pray my long list because there is a lot of hurt in this world, and we sure could use a good dose of redemption. And maybe a little patience, too.