An angry person came into my life this week and turned it upside down. It was horrible. The person was unjust, unkind and unyielding to reason. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it, either. My kids were distraught and I was upset, both for their sake and my own.
I was so stunned and flustered and furious at this person that it took a full four hours for me to calm down enough to remember Jesus’ instructions: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
Sigh. Really? Couldn’t that wait for another day?
Well, no. No, because it wasn’t clear that my agitation was going to abate any time soon. And much as I don’t like to admit it (much less do it) when I’m mad, the fastest way to soothe my own heart is to pray for the good of the one who upset me.
And so with a deep, grudging groan I dredged up the obedience to pray for this person. There was no way on earth I could generate meaningful words of my own, so I chose a prayer from the Bible.
I often do that when I’m distressed, especially when I know the devil’s going to be distracting me, fanning my emotions every word of the way. The advantage of using Scripture to pray is that it’s easy to get back on track whenever I veer off.
Sometimes I use the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes Mary’s prayer, sometimes the prayers of the saints in heaven. Sometimes it’s one of my favorite Psalms. I say the person’s name on whose behalf I am praying, and begin.
The other day I got about two words in before a roar of protest overwhelmed my soul.
I took a deep breath, cleared my head, and started over.
The second time I got five or six words in before I had to go for a re-do. It was war. You can guess how it went from there. I ground that prayer out one begrudging word at a time, then one reluctant phrase at a time, re-starting over and over and over again until I could finally say the whole thing in one go. It took me quite a while.
And then once I’d successfully said it, I started again. I needed to, because by the time I got that far I could feel the hardness in my heart.
To tell the truth, I’ve been saying the same prayer for the same person repeatedly for, uh, three days now. It flows smoothly from my heart at this point, and I have branched out to words of my own as well.
But every now and then (in other words, multiple times a day) my feelings still flare up, and I can sense my heart starting to harden once more. The difference is that now the flare is a red flag that says to my soul, “Pray for her.” And so I do.
