As I write this, my wife and I are quarantined in our house, having tested positive for COVID-19. We’re doing okay, but we’re grateful for the prayers of friends, most of them fellow congregants of ours. Or as likely, “We doing okay because of the prayers of friends.” The Bible, indeed, teaches us to pray for brothers and sisters in physical misery and peril. But it also teaches us to pray for all kinds of concerns, spiritual and physical, social and political, familial and financial. And so on. 

I first heard the expression, “medical center,” applied to corporate prayer when I was in seminary. Several of the profs would ask for prayer requests at the beginning of class, and the vast majority of responses concerned grievous diagnoses, upcoming surgeries, and such, typically among the congregants in the seminarians’ various churches. All good, but there is so much more we should address in our prayer gatherings.

At the church I’ve served as interim pastor for about a year, I asked Lynsey Stratton, the artistic daughter of our executive pastor Rich Stratton, to upgrade a sketch I made of some images we might use for a prayer guide. ‘Upgrade’ is a serious understatement, for she took it several levels beyond what I hoping for. (You see it above.) 

At Wednesday evening prayer meeting, where those not in classes would gather around the dinner tables, I handed these out. Alternatively, we’d go through the categories as a big group, fielding items from the floor, or we’d let each table do its own assessments and intercessments. On the sheet, zigzagging, from the top down, left to right, right to left, and left to right, we directed our attentions to concerns of 1. our city and county; 2. our nation; 3. the work of the pastor search committee; 4. the schools; 5. the homes; 6. medical concerns; 7. the world beyond our county; 8. the workplace; 9. our church; and 10. our neighboring churches. 

Of course, we could have divided up things differently, but this was a start. And, sure enough, our petitions ranged all around the world. Yes, we prayed repeatedly and earnestly (and “successfully”) for the well-being of a preemie who fit within the palm of her father’s hand. But we also prayed for those seeking a new school superintendent; for the welfare of Christians in North Korea; for the emergence of truth in the midst of our chaotic and even vicious national discourse; for local churches gobsmacked by the onset of COVID-19; and for the further revitalization of the downtown business district. Hundreds of different items over the course of a several months. And we weren’t just engaged in group therapy sessions, though there was spiritual refreshment in laying our worries and requests before the Lord. Beyond that, we were bringing appeals to the Lord for action, and we trusted that his yes’s and no’s and not-yet’s and not-ever’s were decisive and perfect deeds of attention to the specific entreaties of his people, entreaties which would have engaged him even if “only two or three” had been “gathered in his name.”

By the way, the no’s and not-ever’s are answerable to the principle that we don’t get a stone if we ask for bread (Matthew 7:9). In my experience, we either get the bread of what we ask, or cake, whose availability and benefits we did not suspect. On a mission trip to Brazil back in the mid-1980s, I prayed for the bread of protection for my health. Instead, God gave me the cake of Hepatitis A, which prompted outpourings of love (and greater respect) from my new congregation, a blessing that would have not come my way had I come home well.