Please pray for me.
Few words come so easily to Christians, aware as we are of our absolute reliance on God. Thanks to social media, we now hear it ten times as often as we used to. Praise God for that! St. Paul tells us that it is “good, and pleasing to God our savior,” when we pray for each other (1 Tim. 2:3).
And yet, the adversary just can’t leave well enough alone. Our Lord warned that pious acts like prayer, fasting, and almsgiving can be corrupted by impure intentions; so too, a mere prayer request, so innocuous on its face, can sometimes be a cover (conscious or not) for a sneaky indulgence in vice.
Whether it’s the stalking horse money ask (“We need your prayers most of all, buuuuuuut if you’d also support us . . .”) or the Christian-flavored “vaguebooking” (“It’s all just too much . . . you think you know a person . . . pray for me to have the strength”), we can probably all think of some type of online prayer request that makes us raise our eyebrows.
Here are two that I want to discuss:
- The (not-so-) secret boast
Leaving for my two-week Europe vacation today! Pray we have a safe flight!
Happy anniversary to the greatest husband/wife in the world! Asking you all to pray for another blissful ten years of marriage!
You’ve been blessed. Awesome! Genuinely happy for you. There’s nothing wrong with openly rejoicing in the Lord’s blessings. But is that all you really wanted to tell us? If so, why attach a prayer request at all? Are you sure you’re not laminating on a spiritual veneer, for optics?
On the flip side, if you really are genuinely seeking divine aid, why attach that request to a cheery sentence about how great everything is going? A friend might reasonably wonder, “Is anything actually…wrong?”
I can imagine some legitimate motives for the examples I gave. Maybe you’re terrified of flying across the ocean. Maybe you’re profoundly aware of how God’s grace sustains your marriage in spite of your personal flaws. What I’m saying is: if such a motive inspires your prayer request, that should accompany it instead of—or at the very least, in addition to—the sunshine and rainbows.
- Gossipy
I heard from my friend that so-and-so’s marriage is REALLY rocky, so she needs our prayers.
This one we all kinda know. It’s a longstanding Christian meme, which means it happens often enough in real life to be joked about. Let’s examine ourselves: are we really bringing this up out of wholesome, unselfish concern for so-and-so’s marriage? Or are we just hoping that our friends will ask, “Oh no, what happened??” It shouldn’t be difficult to discern.
But here’s a subtler version:
Can you pray for so-and-so who seems SO determined to hate me?
I’ve made this very request myself. Our Lord tells us to love and pray for our enemies, so simply asking my friends to pray for this person instead of fuming felt like a win. And yet . . . see how just a little bit of fuming still slipped in? Looking back on that request, I can honestly say now that I was hoping, at least a little bit, that my friends would commiserate about this person’s behavior. Fortunately, they had more sense than I.
I want to emphasize that I am not claiming it’s necessarily a sin to make prayer requests that are worded similarly to these examples. I don’t want to make anyone scrupulous about asking for prayers, of all things! I am saying that whenever we speak in public (and yes, that includes social media), we should be examining our motives and staying honest with ourselves—even when we’re asking for prayers. The tempter has a sneaky way of hijacking pious actions with just a pinch of vice. If you can honestly say that you’re motivated by charity, send out that supplication.
If not . . . well, that’s another thing to pray for.