Let's Pray

We have a simple way of starting prayer at our house.

Someone says, "let's pray." (One of the pastors at our church used to say, "Okie dokie, let's pray," but that's another story.)
It doesn't take a whole lot of commotion to get started. You need have nothing fancy to say. Whatever comes from the heart - and Holy Spirit - after "let's pray," is enough for God to work with. We end by saying, "...in Jesus' name, Amen."
"Please watch over our gathering.
Please bring our daughter and son safely home from their travels.
Please guide our decision in this matter." In Jesus' name, Amen.

I've been through a particularly pressure-filled time at work lately. In one of my meetings last week I dearly wanted to start by saying, "let's pray," because I truly felt inadequate to the task at hand on my own. I didn't say it, of course. It would have been inappropriate in the work setting and I have no quarrels with that. But political correctness is also censoring religious free speech and thought in my non-work, public settings - in the formerly free United States. Activists proactively block us from praying "in Jesus name" at public events.

My own job stress will pass. There are much worse pressure-filled situations throughout the world today. Dangerous, shooting the civilian population-type situations. Overthrowing the government situations. Elected officials refusing to participate in established democratic processes of the republic-type situations. Even the stress of heartbreaking natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamais.

But coincident with many of these dangerous places where people are firing on their constituents, they have also dictated that submission to one particular prophet is law - and it is literally life threatening to pray "in Jesus' name." They burn churches, and murder converts. That goes way beyond the simmering decorum of our USA secular political correctness.

A word of caution though, both ideologies are aggressively intent on eliminating the same practice. What prevents one from becoming more like the other?

Let's pray.

What do you believe?