A Grace-less Way To Live

Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

—James 5:16

I have a friend who wants me to pray for the same situation in her life over and over. She calls me, e-mails me: please pray! I get annoyed with these messages, and I once heard myself say to Aaron, “I don’t have to pray for her. And I’m tired of her demanding that I do. She made a boatload of terrible decisions, and now I have to pray about it?”

Uh-oh. So in my economy, we earn the right to be prayed for by making all the right decisions? Is it my job to decide who does and who doesn’t deserve to be prayed for, based on the tokens they’ve put into the good decision-meter?

It gets worse, actually. She asked for my advice, many years ago, and went against it. This situation wouldn’t exist had she taken my advice. So now my small, ugly self doesn’t want to pray for her.

That’s a grace-less way to live, where everything is an opportunity to achieve or fail. It’s exhausting to live like that, where everything’s a performance, and you can’t trust the people in your life to give you a break or a second chance or what you really are longing for, which is grace.