Prayer I

10 Jul, 2025

Editor's notes: rabbit trails, loses point in the middle; you can have another blog post about personal pain and screaming into the internet later, this is about the prayer box and vulnerability.

When I thought about a prayer box for the webring years ago, I simply thought of it as a 'neat' way to connect for webring members. Just a cool extra function, people can stylize it however they want and it'll display some nice words (in my mind, praise) or a quiet little request.

Prayer has, clearly, never been very intimate for me.

I didn't grow up seeing my parents pray, save before a meal, and I felt a great animosity towards prayer requests from church members because I knew I would leave right after service and never seem them again. My Grandparents have a bad history of church-hopping which persists today, with me and my sister caught in an odd spiritual custody battle between them and my Mum. Over the years, how often we went to church would be about as often as they church-hopped -- once every year or so, rarely more.

This, combined with my disgust and second-hand embarrassment for maximum shock value and pity-point-grabbing “prayer requests” from shameless classmates, really turned me off from being intimate in prayer. I became a believer in secret prayer but that is a bad thing to be when you don’t know how to pray. I only learned earlier this year, and I am still learning, but “praise” seems to be the essential aspect I was missing - I’ve been trying to apply the ACTS acronym to my prayer. Even now, I almost feel like I shouldn’t talk about this. Everything I did, if I prayed or not, shared or not, all coalesced into an oozy, disgusting pit of shame. But I am not so different from those sympathy-grabbing peers of mine; I, too, want attention for all my pain. That’s why I scream into the void of the internet and became a part of it. Instead of prayer, I had venting or online journal entries and no place at all to place my pain. I did feel shame after sending them out into the world but my pain was oozing from everything I touched and I had to do something with it.

I never thought prayer could be so vulnerable until I took a look at a couple of websites that have “prayer boards” for users to send in prayer requests. A friend sent them to me to use as inspirtation for the “prayer box” for the webring (yes this post is still largely about the prayer box). I don’t think I should share these boards, because they are very intimate and likely only known by the groups of churches that use them, but it wrenched something in my mind to read a few of them. One in particular, a man begging for his son to come home safely. From what I could gather, it seemed this son is older and ran away from home (sound familiar?) and he just wants him to be safe and kept in God’s arms. Nearer the end of the request, the words become less sentences and more a stream of desperation and “I beg you” and “please.” Yet this man still managed to say, “I love you Jesus” right at the end. My hands shook for hours after reading. This wasn’t a disgusting gab for attention, this was a lonely call being sent into the void of the internet but a still just as valid request for prayer. \

If you tried to explain to [man] that men’s prayers today are one of the innumberable co-ordinates with which [God] harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then [God] always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself--so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given ‘from the word go.’
What he ought to say, of course, is obvious; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for [men’s] free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind [God’s] Love. How it does so is no problem at all; for [God] does not forsee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it. ~ C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters¹

I don’t know his story, but I hope that man’s prayers are answered. Or, rather, I’ll do my best to remember to pray for his plight, and hope God has it all worked out.

Ever since being on neocities and interacting with people, and splurging out my suicide-filled diary, I've gotten emails from people saying that theyre praying for me. People who don't even follow me or are part of the ring. I've also recieved the secular equivalent, if that’s how it should be said, from entirely unrelated people or LGBT folk² who say they wish me well and don't want me to commit suicide. I’ll make another post about prayer and how I felt recieving these and related thoughts but I do want to say thank you.

I think it has been a very good choice to make the webring, even if it splashed some drama around upon conception. I was, and still am, an idiot, emotionally immature girl. That will change and has already changed significantly and my desire to tend to the webring and care for it seriously has also changed and grown. This little project and the connections I’ve made have proven to be more important than I anticipated and it may be so for members as well.

Please, stay on the lookout for updates to the webring within the year with the much-mentioned prayer box. Due to my revelation for the intimacy and vulnerability of prayer, all the protections I can think of will be in place to prevent abuse. Thank you so much. This article was last edited 1 month, 2 weeks ago

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