Pre-Written Prayers Are Reusable and Helpful Too

Growing up IFB(Independent Fundamental Baptist) I was taught that the only real prayers were those you prayed on the spot.  It was clearly said that any accidental recordings of prayers weren't able to be prayed again because they could only be prayed once.  Of course the Psalms were never seen as any type of prayer.  The "Lord's Prayer" wasn't a real prayer either; it was just a model of how we were to pray.  The older I grew the more restrictions and rules there were that applied to how to properly pray to God.  I didn't have to use thee's and thou's, but if I did evidently God required grammatical consistency in order to be pleased with my prayer, and I couldn't mix in a 'you' anywhere.

By the time I reached my early 20's I stopped praying.  I was too afraid I'd do it wrong and incur God's wrath for my presumption in prayer.  I would pray for specific requests for people in great need or pain.  Eventually pastors caught on that people prayed for things and weren't praying all the other proper sorts of prayers that were divided correctly into whatever the right way to pray was.  So for a while in my 20's and early 30's I heard more about how wrong it is to use God as only someone to ask things from, but not talk to him in any other way in prayer.  Big push on prayer, not prayer requests.  Once again I altered the way I prayed and only prayed for life or death issues. 

Imagine my surprise when we began going to a different church and I observed men going up to pray from the pulpit with their prayer already written out.  Now I knew that sort of thing happened at Bob Jones University in chapel, but I counted that as a speech requirement for the 'preacher boys' and never considered they were praying for real.  But here this was a real church and they had written prayers?  Baptist love to talk about the slippery slope, but seeing prayers written out and prayed in a meaningful way in public for the first time was a first step in a long theological journey away from fundamentalism.

I still don't pray my own original prayers, except on rare occasions, but I'm learning to pray the prayers that others have written.  Here is one that fits me pretty well right now.

Sustain Me in the Coming Then

O God, empty me of angry judgments,
   and aching disappointments,
         and anxious trying,
and breathe into me
   something like quietness
         and confidence,
that the lion and the lamb in me
   may lie down together
         and be led by a trust
as straightforward as a little child.

Catch my pride and doubt off guard
that, at least for the moment,
I may sense your presence
   and your caring,
and be surprised
   by a sudden joy
        rising in me now
to sustain me in the sudden then.

from Guerrillas of Grace by Ted Loder