There is nothing easier than making a Christian feel guilty about his prayer life. Everyone seems embarrassed about the little praying they do or the lot of praying they don’t do. To build the guilt to psychiatric proportions, just mention some Christian saint of the past who had no trouble praying four or five hours a day before breakfast—even on weekends and public holidays. Just for good measure, throw in a latter day St Sadist whose church is growing at an alarming rate and whose obvious spiritual power is a result of him having given up food; he just prays. By now, you should have one groveling Christian.
But what is the answer to this lack of prayer? Everyone acknowledges that we should do it more, but how can we fit it in amid the unrelenting busyness of the modern world?
Thankfully, technology, that great labour-saver, has come up with the answer. It won’t be long before every Australian home will have replaced the three china ducks with a personal computer. And then, bingo—or should I say, ‘blip’—no more prayer worries.
Have you ever thought why those saints of old had to spend so much time in prayer? The answer is obvious: their praying was inefficient. They didn’t have the technology. Now, if they’d had a decent microprocessor (say an 80386—no, let’s not be greedy—an 80286 would do), they would have eaten their prayer list for breakfast, instead of for five hours before breakfast.
Think of it. All you need is a database of the people and organizations you want to pray for. Then you construct various ‘form prayers’ containing a wide variety of theologically sound petitions to the Most High. Whenever you wish to pray, a simple merge program would incorporate the names into the appropriate spaces in the prayers, and your computer would pray them through in a flash.
To increase efficiency, and to ensure that your people were prayed through at least once a day, you could set the computer to automatically run the prayer program every time you booted up. With the speeds now being achieved on personal computers, your prayer list could be prayed through thousands of times an hour.
Can you catch the vision? In the office, your prayer list is being prayed through behind the scenes while you work on your spreadsheet or word processor. At home, it could be happily running while your kids blast away at the extra-terrestrial invaders.
Yes, prayer is the power source of the church. With a glut of ‘How to pray better’ books, kits and courses, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a method to take advantage of the available technology. Remember where you read it first!
