Of our tired ways of praying – and a God who must be extremely tolerant with it!

By Charles Muchiri

An excessive use of your clothes, however favourite they may be, leads to an obvious wear-out. An excessive use of particular phrases in either the spoken or the written language leads to cliché phrases.

I also bet that there are some Christians who absolutely can’t find new words to use, particularly while communicating with their God. They always have a similar way, a similar style; they use the same words, the same phrases that they did yesterday, the previous week, the previous month, years upon years back!

Most probably, they use the very same words that they heard from someone, somewhere else, in another situation, many-many sunrises ago!

I call them Cliché prayers. Tired, worn-out, dead-beat prayers! And I have heard many of them at the church, in the small Christian communities, at family gatherings, at the corporate functions, everywhere!

Picture this; a gathering is just about to depart, and one elderly, respectable auntie is offered a chance to say the final prayer;

“Lord,” she rolls of with authority. “We pray, that as we depart from this place that our bodies may part, but let our spirit be in unity,”

When this is said in my mother tongue, and you so happen to have heard it hundreds of time, you can surely conclude that God must be extremely tolerant with some of us!

Now, after the parting, several of those who were gathered were set to travel. And as sure as death, you would expect another cliché.

“We are praying for those who are about to leave for Nairobi (or wherever) God you know, that they will be traveling using vehicles that have been made by the human hand,” My goodness, how many times does our God has to contend with this!

Can’t we seek some new words? Some new phrases? Some fresh ways of talking to God? Can we break; overturn these obvious clichés, and perhaps make the Heaven’s Prayer’s Call Center a more interesting place for angels to work in? Can’t we?
  
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