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Authors: Jonathan Acuff
Tags: Non-Fiction
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prayer circle, someone will raise their hand with a prayer request and then proceed to gossip about somebody else. Usually it sounds like this:
“I want to lift up my friends Charlie and Sandra. Sandra caught Charlie looking at pornography online, and he yelled at her for running up all their credit cards. And you all probably know their son got kicked out of school for getting drunk and doing the African Anteater Dance from the movie Can’t Buy Me Love at the homecoming dance. So I really just want to pray for them.”
I’m sure that when God hears stuff like that, he wants to throw a lightning bolt down at us. And not just a regular one, but some sort of super lightning bolt coated with tigers and switchblades. But what should you do when someone in your small group disguises gossip as prayer?
I suggest you hit that person with a plank.
I know, that sounds violent. Beating someone with a 2 x 4 chunk of wood about the head, neck, and shoulder regions might seem aggressive at first. But hear me out. I think that when a new small group is forming, they should make a “Please Stop Gossiping” plank together. They can decorate it and paint it and make designing it a communal activity like fraternities with their paddles. Then, at the start of each prayer circle, just lay the “Please Stop Gossiping” plank in the middle of the room. The moment someone starts down that path, the first person to grab the plank gets to hit them. And the offender can’t act surprised—because they helped design the plank. If they act indignant, just bust out the “splinter in my eye, plank upside yo’ head” verse. That’s in the Bible, and when the room stops spinning from the donnybrook you just initiated, you can show them the verse.
The plank is effective, but if you don’t have access to wood, the fastest, easiest way to punch prayer gossip in the mouth—besides actually punching someonein the mouth—is to say, “This is about you—isn’t it?” Just insist that the horrible things your friend is gossiping about are actually true of them instead of somebody else. Keep saying, “This is about you—isn’t it? Come on…‘I have a friend named “Frank” who met a girl online in the Niagara Falls area and she stole his identity’? That’s you, right? Someone stole your Social Security card and they’re living it up, looking at big waterfalls and spending your cash.” Eventually your gossiping friend will grow tired of your shenanigans and say something like, “Stop! It’s not about me! I would never do something like that. That’s horrible!” At which point you can say, “Aha! You’re right. Those are horrible things, and you’re telling us horrible things about your friends. In Proverbs 6:17 – 19, on the list of things God hates, gossip is listed with murder. Murder! What’s next? Are you going to kill one of us? You are. Aren’t you? A pox on you and your kin.”
All right, you should probably leave out that last line about the pox. It’s not particularly compassionate, and I probably just threw it in there because I wanted to make it seem like I read Shakespeare so much that sometimes it just spills out uncon-trollably.
THE HEDGE OF PROTECTION: SLOW GROWING, EASILY JUMPED, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH PROTECTION FOR THESE CRAZY TIMES
I think the uber-popular Christian prayer request for a “hedge of protection” is in the Bible, but I’m not sure. It sounds like something David would have written in the book of Psalms. He’s very poetic and our most Bono-like writer. But a friend of mine once revealed that he’s always found that to be an inadequate security measure. As a child, when his mother would pray that he would have a hedge of protection or a hedge of angels around him, he would think, “Anyone can jump a hedge. How hard is that? Forget the hedge of angels; I’m praying for a dome of angels.”
At first I laughed at that story, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. These are
“I want to lift up my friends Charlie and Sandra. Sandra caught Charlie looking at pornography online, and he yelled at her for running up all their credit cards. And you all probably know their son got kicked out of school for getting drunk and doing the African Anteater Dance from the movie Can’t Buy Me Love at the homecoming dance. So I really just want to pray for them.”
I’m sure that when God hears stuff like that, he wants to throw a lightning bolt down at us. And not just a regular one, but some sort of super lightning bolt coated with tigers and switchblades. But what should you do when someone in your small group disguises gossip as prayer?
I suggest you hit that person with a plank.
I know, that sounds violent. Beating someone with a 2 x 4 chunk of wood about the head, neck, and shoulder regions might seem aggressive at first. But hear me out. I think that when a new small group is forming, they should make a “Please Stop Gossiping” plank together. They can decorate it and paint it and make designing it a communal activity like fraternities with their paddles. Then, at the start of each prayer circle, just lay the “Please Stop Gossiping” plank in the middle of the room. The moment someone starts down that path, the first person to grab the plank gets to hit them. And the offender can’t act surprised—because they helped design the plank. If they act indignant, just bust out the “splinter in my eye, plank upside yo’ head” verse. That’s in the Bible, and when the room stops spinning from the donnybrook you just initiated, you can show them the verse.
The plank is effective, but if you don’t have access to wood, the fastest, easiest way to punch prayer gossip in the mouth—besides actually punching someonein the mouth—is to say, “This is about you—isn’t it?” Just insist that the horrible things your friend is gossiping about are actually true of them instead of somebody else. Keep saying, “This is about you—isn’t it? Come on…‘I have a friend named “Frank” who met a girl online in the Niagara Falls area and she stole his identity’? That’s you, right? Someone stole your Social Security card and they’re living it up, looking at big waterfalls and spending your cash.” Eventually your gossiping friend will grow tired of your shenanigans and say something like, “Stop! It’s not about me! I would never do something like that. That’s horrible!” At which point you can say, “Aha! You’re right. Those are horrible things, and you’re telling us horrible things about your friends. In Proverbs 6:17 – 19, on the list of things God hates, gossip is listed with murder. Murder! What’s next? Are you going to kill one of us? You are. Aren’t you? A pox on you and your kin.”
All right, you should probably leave out that last line about the pox. It’s not particularly compassionate, and I probably just threw it in there because I wanted to make it seem like I read Shakespeare so much that sometimes it just spills out uncon-trollably.
THE HEDGE OF PROTECTION: SLOW GROWING, EASILY JUMPED, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH PROTECTION FOR THESE CRAZY TIMES
I think the uber-popular Christian prayer request for a “hedge of protection” is in the Bible, but I’m not sure. It sounds like something David would have written in the book of Psalms. He’s very poetic and our most Bono-like writer. But a friend of mine once revealed that he’s always found that to be an inadequate security measure. As a child, when his mother would pray that he would have a hedge of protection or a hedge of angels around him, he would think, “Anyone can jump a hedge. How hard is that? Forget the hedge of angels; I’m praying for a dome of angels.”
At first I laughed at that story, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. These are
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