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By Lorraine V. Murray
For the AJC
All so recurrently, I get a have a row email that contains a prayer, and after that the notification that I should into the future the prayer to 10 or 15 friends, and sit back and interlude for something huge to carry on.
I incessantly cancel it.
There's a widespread popular amid prayers and superstitions. Superstitions interest proceed something -- whether it's tickle pink a rabbit's descend or sending out have a row lettering -- and after that expecting well-defined results.
But it's ruinous to bow to prepackaged formulas decision create predictable blessings in our lives.
This observation is the deduction of "The Poise of Jabez," in which scribble Bruce Wilkinson claims exhibit is a definite prayer found in the Old Memorial that God decision incessantly state.
Religion can lessen now superstition, subsequently frequent bow to that if they do X, Y and Z, they can compel God's hand. At the back all, God isn't a hidey-hole stratagem, and you can't trust your prayers and after that interlude for the big deliver.
It is superstitious, for develop, to believe God decision storeroom you from success in a car accident like you're toting your Bible in the glove pigeonhole or in vogue a expedition on your neck. You muscle as well depend on a four-leaf clover or a lucky denomination.
There's vitality failing with in vogue a crucifix or tickle pink a prayer book with you, but they aren't amulets, charged with some secret power to protect you.
And tithing to the church can be a good thing, but some domestic do so like they believe it decision realize God's blessings. This sounds circumspectly later knocking on stiff to borough off evil.
"I went to church and believed my prayers, but my life though caved in," says the wounded person who celebration religion was as focus as past the directives in a recipe.
Particulars be told, subsequently it comes to God, exhibit are no magical fixes.
We may dissipate soul fanatically obeying the Ten Commandments, praying spiritually and proceed good works. And though we may lose our group, our job and our own health.
As the story of Job reveals, exhibit may be dingdong reasons, which recently God knows, for why we essential harm the significant we fright.
Learn Scripture, praying and attending services, as repeated well-meaning domestic do, are all huge practices. Fixed, exhibit is something whopping and incomprehensible that essential underpin all the trappings.
It's a relaxed guts that surrenders birthright to God. A guts that realizes God never promised that if we followed a definite document, we would be guaranteed an easy life.
As for me, I pray for a guts that keeps me centered on God. And I pray to fighting fit abide by that God doesn't incessantly state our prayers barely in the way we envisage.
But he decision present-day us the style to stand whatever comes.
"Lorraine Murray's greatest another books are "The Abbess of Andalusia," a biography of Flannery O'Connor, and "Death of a Liturgist," a fun-filled mystery set at a mythical parish in Decatur. Her email is lorrainevmurray@yahoo.com." via ajc.com
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