What to do with a prayer list that keeps getting longer
By Ruthanne Pilcher, Contributing writer · · 2 min read
A woman wrote to us before Christmas. I will not use her name. She said she keeps a prayer list in a spiral notebook, the kind with the wire down the side, and that it has forty-one names on it, and that she has begun to dread opening it, because by the time she gets to the bottom she has forgotten the top, and she feels she has cheated the people at the top.
I have kept the list at our church for nineteen years, so I have some opinions.
You are not the only one praying
The first thing I would say to her is that the list is not a contract. Nobody on it is waiting on you alone. Most of those forty-one people have a sister, a Sunday school class, a daughter in another state, and the Lord himself, who does not need to be reminded. You are joining something that is already going on. You are not holding it up.
Say the names, and let that be the prayer
When the list at church got past sixty, our pastor started doing something I thought was lazy and now think was wise. He read the names. That was all. No sentence after each one. He said the name, waited about as long as it takes to breathe in, and went on. Forty names took under two minutes. People wept.
You can do that at your kitchen table. Read the names out loud. The Lord knows what Harold needs; you do not have to explain it to him.
Cross some off
This is the part people do not like. A list that only grows is not a prayer list, it is a monument. When Harold comes home from the hospital, write the date next to his name and move him to the back page. The back page is for thanks. Mine is longer than the front, which I did not expect when I started.
I will say that the first time I moved a name to the back page I felt I was giving up on the person, and that the second time I understood I was doing the opposite. I was writing down that the Lord had done something, which the front page, with its forty-one open questions, never gets around to recording.
The answer that is not practical
The reader said she feels she has cheated the people at the top when she gets to the bottom. I understand the feeling and I do not think it is true, but I also do not think she will stop feeling it because I said so.
Lord, here is the list. You know it better than I do. Hold the ones I forget.
That is the whole prayer some mornings. It has forty-one names in it whether you say them or not.