For Wilshire Baptist Church
I don’t recall exactly when it started but sometime early in our relationship LeAnn and I began holding hands whenever there was a prayer being spoken. Certainly it was a sign of our shared faith, but I confess that early on it was a good excuse to lace our fingers together as couples do when they’re beginning to feel connected. We were sort of hiding out in the beginning, and prayer time offered a chance to make contact while “every head was bowed and every eye was closed.”
We hold hands in prayer all the time now whether saying grace at home, standing in prayer at church, sitting in Sunday School, or attending a civic meeting or athletic event that still includes an invocation. Sometimes if we’re in the same room but not side by side we’ll scoot toward each other and slip our hands together just before the prayer. Somehow it completes the prayer for us — as if maybe two are stronger than one.
It has become such a regular thing that sometimes when we are not together I have to push back against the impulse to grab a hand. I had that feeling Monday night at deacons meeting. I don’t suppose Tim or Aaron sitting on either side of me would have minded too much, but there might have been some puzzled looks and explaining to do after the amen since nobody had been asked to join hands. I was glad to have LeAnn back beside me the next night as we prayed at the opening of a city council meeting.
Of course there are times when we do reach across the aisles and around the tables to grasp hands and pray with people who aren’t our spouses or who we don’t even know. Former pastor Bruce McIver was fond of having everyone join hands across the sanctuary to sing “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” That’s mostly a prayer set to music and you could feel the Spirit shared in the physical connections.
I got the same feeling at the end of Scout troop meetings when we would stand in a circle, cross arms, grasp hands, and recite the Scoutmaster’s Benediction: “And now may the great Master of all scouts be with us until we meet again.” It was a way of uniting as a community and speaking to God in one strong voice made from many.
My years living near the Catholic faith introduced me to communal, liturgical prayers. We evangelicals often dismiss them as “rote,” but I grew to find peace and comfort in the familiar words and rhythms spoken in unison. It was like speaking to the God who is eternal and constant with words that were eternal and constant. The irony was that my Catholic mother-in-law at the time would sometimes ask me to say grace at the table. She said she liked my “beautiful” prayers, which I think meant my freestyle Baptist delivery was a nice change from the standard table blessing.
Even so, my freestyle prayers were built from what I heard growing up. I was raised in a family that prayed and that meant there were familiar patterns and phrases. On my father’s side, Grandpa would always ask God to “lead, guide and direct us,” which if you think about it pretty much covers all the bases of God’s sovereignty. And on my mother’s side, Grandad couldn’t bless the roast beef and vegetables without tearing up. I never asked him about that but my guess is he prayed with a heart full of gratitude. Not a bad way to go about it.
My prayer life today is a mixture of these and other influences, the most recent addition being this habit of holding hands. So you better watch out if you’re standing next to me during a prayer.