Prayer: The Best Supporting Role

When you're lucky enough to get downtime in your day, sometimes your body betrays you for sleep. And not unlike the ebb and flow of water, body and brain may play a game of dare, one on the run and the other at the gate. Your head nods, your arms slip, your eyes close—until you catch yourself, and jerk, and nod, and jerk and nod, and chuckle, hoping no one was watching.

What you never consider is how your muscles support your body until the paralysis that comes with sleep overtakes the impulse to stay upright. I imagine it as a stately tree bending in the wind without apparent support. We are hardly ever aware that we actively hold ourselves erect. It seems that after we sat up and took our first steps, we forgot about the bio-mechanics of it all.

So it is with prayer. We may not know how it works; we just know it does. Especially when some force or maybe our own vices try to overcome it. By prayer we stand and have stood for so long. Prayer holds the world and our lives in posture—prayers for us and by us and those we pray involuntarily and those reaching heaven from some distant place on earth, unknown. They are always there: powerful as muscles and yet as undetectable. Glory to God, for he hears!