26 February: Prayer as Visioneering

OK, I’ll agree with my spell-check and dictionary.com that “visioneering” is not a word. Marketing and business books use it regardless of this fact. When these books bring up the topic, they try to convey a combination of pioneering with vision; some hopeful anticipation of the future that takes one into uncharted territory. The most successful innovators, it seems, are those who can see potential previously undiscovered or unappreciated and chase that down like no predecessor ever did.

I would like to suggest that, when it comes to prayer for others, we should be doing the same thing. Often prayers rightly deal with present concerns and pressing occasions for praise, but it’s something else altogether when we pray and love someone with hope. Something quite subtle can happen when we reach this point of asking God to do something: we make modest requests. We don’t mean to insult God or be unloving to the person, it’s just that, sometimes, we forget Who we’re talking to and what He’s capable of doing in this person’s life. If our view for God’s grandeur is fuzzy or absent, we forget to come to Him with hope He brings and end up just asking for what might naturally happen anyway. We lose a vision of God and, thus, lose our vision for anyone else.

When it comes to prayer, what we can see provides the occasion for us to approach what we can’t. So, even though it seems unlikely that our relative whom we’ve always known to be angry would ever have a gentle spirit or that AIDS in Africa will ever be curbed, we still approach Our Father with eyes gleaming with hope, unperturbed by whether or not our requests seem likely. Prayer starts by looking downward (on what is before us), but must look forward and upward to be Christian prayer. Prayer is not about the hope which is found in what is seen, but in what heaven could move the present to become.

A quote from CS Lewis’ most famous talk (“The Weight of Glory”) bears repeating:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. . . . It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. . . . Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Visionaries see what others overlook or undervalue and confidently advance to make their hopes embodied. Go and pray likewise.

Assignment: Go and pray likewise.