And then they open the floor for others to pray, maybe went around in a circle – pop-corned it around perhaps?
Have you ever felt a slight jump in your heart, a sweating in your palms…
“Please don’t call on me to pray”, you might utter in your mind
Wince a little if you get picked as you fight the butterflies tickling your stomach, and you slowly begin;
“Heavenly Father……”
Well, this was me…and sometimes still is me.
There were countless opportunities I found myself asked to pray, hating the fact that I’d overthink and rehearse the words I’d utter just a moment later when it was my turn to talk to God. Why would I work myself into knots to pray to my Father just because it was in front 
of a few others? Where did these expectations of what prayer in public needed to sound like come from?
This is not what prayer should be, but why can’t I seem to find a way to go about it differently I would wonder.
I know I’m not the only one to encounter this predicament.
As I travel the world more and more, I’m continuously amazed by how much we are all essentially the same. We may have different branding or packaging when it comes to our persons, but underneath the hood of our beings we’re all still humans as God created us and we struggle/cry/rejoice in the same basic stuff.
Across culture, gender, age, race and nation, we all may suffer this odd notion.
I even saw it here in Malaysia at a prayer meeting
A girl maybe in her late teens/early 20s was asked to pray and she turned her head shyly and giggled with the girl sitting next to her as she motioned to pass off the option to pray.
Just start doing it.
You’ll never work through these things if you don’t practice them.
But I promise, the more you buck up and push through the awkwardness of not knowing what to say or maybe hoping you hit on something really profound to have success – the more you let go and give to God, the sooner He will inspire you as you’ve set yourself free to follow Him.
Trust me. This works. I’m a growing product of being willing to
step out in faith when God asks me to pray in some public manor.
Last month it was jumping in when asked to pray for individuals one by one in a room full of Filipinos that I didn’t
Malaysia we prayed for in the same manor.
In the past, I may have resisted at the prospect of doing things like this. But you know what, when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the idea of “what the heck am I going to say” or questioning if I’m spiritually enough in this situation, I throw up a quick of ‘God, give me words’ prayer, take a deep breath and plunge right in.
No. 1
