An intriguing opinion on prayer
From Kevin Roose, an Ivy League student who spent a semester “undercover” at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in an experiment of understanding, in a Happiness Project interview with Gretchen Rubin:
I’m not an evangelical Christian, and I don’t believe that God sits on his throne in heaven watching our requests flood into his cosmic inbox. But I do think there’s value in focusing on the needs of my friends and family members, trying to empathize with them for ten or twenty minutes a day. It forces me to be aware of how lucky I am, and I really do think it motivates me to be more compassionate. As the writer Oswald Chambers says, it’s not so much that prayer changes things, but that prayer changes me, and I change things.
I know plenty of people - dozens, through some “extracurricular” work I do - who self-identify as agnostic, yet still report that their lives are immeasurably happier and better when they are in the practice of daily prayer. Maybe this is one reason why it works so well for them. (The result of Roose’s experiment at Liberty is The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.)
Filed under: Life
That’s a very good description of the value of prayer - I’d go along with that.
Likely also why gratitude practice works, even for professed athiests. Takes the focus off of the self and its ruminations for a bit.