I will never forget that small church I visited over a decade ago. Melissa and I were in the midst of gathering our support to go to Spain and I was invited to this small congregation to present our ministry in Spain and to share what the Lord was doing in our lives. I was fresh out of seminary, very inexperienced, and I happened to come to the service earlier and sat in their adult Sunday school with 7 adults.
Before the class started, the teacher asked, “Are there any prayer requests?” An older saint raised her hand immediately, you can tell she had something to share, yet when she was called upon she said, “it’s unspoken”.
Two words, well two and a half words… “It’s. Unspoken.” What did that mean? What in the world is an unspoken prayer? The Sunday school teacher did his best to pray for Sister So and So and her “unspoken prayer,” yet the question still lingered in my mind… What is so private about a prayer request that this older saint could not share with the 7 people that were in that claustrophobic classroom? I do not know, but it really does not matter. Perhaps it was something very heavy for her to bear. Possibly it was private. Nevertheless all those years ago, I remember driving home, it was a very long drive that included a lot of L.A. traffic, meditating on a verse Galatians 6:2, “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.”
It is easy to pile on this poor older saint for not being “real” and sharing her prayer request, but I believe that the onus is on us (no pun intended). We must create a culture where we bear one another’s burdens as we seek to glorify Christ with our lives. And how do we do this? We do it by being honest and sincere ourselves, we do it by seeing our church as our family in the faith, we do it by honoring the Lord with our lives by bearing, by carrying other’s burdens because of what the Lord is done for us.
We also do it by having a high view of God. The sovereignty and the love of God bring us hope and allow us to be open and honest with one another. So, instead of sharing unspoken prayers, we can be sincere with others because we know that God is sovereign over everything, even our faults and our frustrations. At the same time and in the middle of our difficulties, we know that God loves us because He already demonstrated his love for us in that when we were yet sinners, Christ died for us! (Romans 5:8).
