Pott: Praying Aloud, With Others

By Marian Pott
Community UMC of Half Moon Bay
[Adapted from the November 2006 Communique]

November 2006

I have prayed all of my life, from childhood on.

There were prayers of grace at the dinner table. We lived in fear. Papa would invariably visit the play room and say those dreaded words in the half hour before dinner was served. "It's your turn to say grace tonight." If ever there was a time for conspiring with the devil, this was it -- anything to get out of praying out loud, in front of them. This was the one thing no amount of bribery could get a sibling or a cousin to take your place.

Growing up, prayers were often said for us -- in Sunday School, church, at Papa's funeral, even at bedtime with my mother mostly agreeable to getting the job done.

God cradled me in the tumultuous years of teens and twenties. He carried me through the heartbreaks; His grace presiding over me when I thought I least deserved it. As much as I cried over one-sided relationships, He didn't desert me. In those days there was a lot of misplaced anger, which of course He took the brunt of.

About seven years ago I was invited to be a part of a small women's prayer group made up of five members. Besides being believers, we only had a few things in common, mostly that we were mothers who lived on the Coast. We didn't all attend the same churches, and our faith journeys and backgrounds were vastly different, but I learned how to pray from these women. And to think I almost didn't go to the first meeting out of sheer terror. Praying aloud, in front of other people, wasn't that something I could strictly avoid now?

But I did go, and after that first time it got easier. We followed a format called ACTS -- Acclamation, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. I still follow this format in much of my prayer life, both weekly with my Bible study group and in private. Because of this, my relationship with God has changed dramatically. Praising God wasn't exactly a new concept for me, but to start out this way -- to acknowledge who He is, to honor Him, to exclaim joy in being one of His chosen, to give Him glory -- lifts me up.

The revolutionary part of this ACTS format was confession. I grew up with the notion that confession was a Catholic thing, with priests and closets with curtains and Hail Marys. But then, that was pretty much the same notion I had of sin. Through confessing my sins, both past and present, I began to learn, to know, to comprehend the true value of the price Jesus paid.