Mentors and Teachers

Prayer is nothing new to most of us.  Most of us have been doing it for a long, long time.  If you are like me, it is hard to remember a time when there was not some kind of bedtime prayer prayed.  The first prayer came from my mother who taught me to pray it.   Unlike the disciples who asked Jesus to teach them, my mother just taught me to pray because she knew it was important for me to learn.  The prayer she taught was simple enough.  Since it has that line within it saying, "...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take," it would likely be deemed too frightening for today's children to pray. 

 

But, even those who did not learn to pray because a mother taught them to pray have someone in their life who became both a teacher and a model for the praying they learned to do.  Some of us may have heard our first prayers in a Sunday School class, or from the preacher who stood in the pulpit of some church of our past.  Or, we may have listened to some friends praying and launched out in a style similar to theirs.  Perhaps, the important thing is that we began the discipline of prayer which, hopefully, we continue to this very day.

 

Tonight as we pray, perhaps, it would be a good thing to remember those who prayed for us before we started praying for ourselves.  Perhaps, it would be a good thing to let our mind wander back down the not so clear roads of the past until we begin to remember those who stood before us as mentors and teachers in praying.  Most likely we never thanked them.  If they are still with us, what a joy it would be to them to hear a word of gratitude from us.  If they are not, then we can still call their names in our praying asking God to continue to bless the spiritual seeds they planted in folks like us.