We Must Make Our Prayer List Our 'To Do' List

Prayer is the soul's sincere desire

uttered or unexpressed,

the motion of a hidden fire

that trembles in the breast.

- James Montgomery 1818

One of my aims upon awakening in the  morning is to offer a prayer of blessing for each of the twenty households listed in our house church directory, along with members of our family and others for whom we have concerns. But I've been wondering, can my praying become a convenient substitute for my actually reaching out to bless more of the people and circumstances I care about? 

If it is at least partly partly true that "God has no hands but our hands," then the words of Pope Francis are especially apt, "You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works."

I used to wonder why Jesus placed the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," right in the middle of his teaching about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. Prayer is usually thought of as asking God to do things for us, with the promise that if we ask with urgency and persistence, God will give us what we ask for, that if we seek, and keep on seeking, we will find what we are longing for, and that if we knock and continue knocking, God will open doors of opportunity for us. That's the context for Jesus's  Golden Rule text about our doing to, and for, others whatever we would have others--and God--do for us.

So the praying and the doing go hand in hand, never one without the other. The "sincere desire" in the above hymn, inflamed by prayerful attention to a broken-hearted God, must result in "the motion of a hidden fire," our compassionate action. Our prayer list must become a part of our "to do" list.

In the words of the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Letters and Papers From Prison,

People turn to God when God is sore bestead: 

they find God poor, disgraced, without roof or bread,

attacked by sin, thus weakened, and deprived of life. 

A Christian stands by God to share God's pain and strife. 

In other words, prayer is more about our hearts and minds being aligned with God's, rather than about our changing God's mind and to have God work on our behalf.