Spirituality Column #725

October 6, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Pray Some More

By Bob Walters

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” – Romans 15:13

NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt wasn’t quite the same guy away from the race track that his competition persona – “The Intimidator” – suggests.

I didn’t know him well, but, having worked in and around NASCAR (as a sportswriter and then public relations rep) back in the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Dale well enough to like him.  As long as he wasn’t in or near his race car, Dale, in my experience, was funny, charming, polite, considerate with a good dose of mischievousness, and sedately wise in a special, good ol’ southern boy kind of way.

I bring this up because though seven-time champion Dale always seemed to be in trouble with other competitors or NASCAR officials for his daring and aggressive – many would say thrilling – driving, he knew when to stop worrying about a problem when the past was past.  “I want to move on,” I heard him say in an interview one time, grinning, “but people will say, ‘No, let’s go back and worry about this some more.’”

I bring this up in a column about Christian life and faith because right now, today, the world presents all of us with a circuit-breaking overload of issues, dangers, politics, and woes.  We are enduring national storms that shake foundations set in sand and rattle even the ones set in rock.  We are constantly, personally reminded of and coached to dwell in the morass of culture, media, academia, and politics that refuses to look forward in faith-driven hope.  It instead grips tightly to political outrage, demeaning identities, perceived injustices, jealousies, grudges, and human slights of every kind.

Harbored rancor creates a cesspool I do not want to visit, inhabit, nurture, or inflict on anyone else.  Whether reaching back two days, two decades, or 200 years, today’s dominant forces of secular information distribution are tuned to fear and control, not solutions and freedoms.  That shifting sand of constant wrong-footedness-by-design and relational turmoil is Satan’s quicksand and freedom’s demise.  Problems abound.

“Let’s worry about this some more.”  How about if we examine a better way?

The better way is God’s hope, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the witness of Jesus Christ.  What did Jesus witness to?  The truth, love, and permanence of God.  What can we do with that in our lives?  Live in joy and peace.  How do we do that? 

There was a great example of it in Washington D.C. last weekend: Prayer.

It was right there at national ground zero, amid the perpetual daily upheavals, fears, and insecurities of public problems, prevarications, and riots.  It was amid disturbing, changing-every-day discussions of political and cultural turmoil.  As a nation suddenly perched on a sandbar of ill-intentions, mistrust, and contention flailing against temporal despair of its own making, there appeared the picture of the rock-solid big fix.

Fifty-thousand faithful, peaceful, sincere Kingdom warriors marched with love and without hate in Christian prayer for things they know to be true.  Prayer in Jesus’s name has the mysterious strength of both unending permanence and constant renewal.  Prayer for our nation and our leaders is our first privilege and duty, not our last hope and desperation.  Joy and peace, belief and power … all attach real hope to prayer.  

Those folks were tapping not only into two thousand years of Christian faith but the stable whole and truth of the eternal trinity and tactile here-and-now of God’s glory.

Don’t be intimidated by earthly problems.  Pray some more; and worry less.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wept when Earnhardt died at Daytona in 2001.