Reflection for October 17

Among my many rebellious behaviors is my refusal to ask God for stuff, especially before meals, especially out loud. Requests for divine intervention usually strike me as jejune and quixotic. Why should God grant one request when another supplicant is asking for the opposite? Why should one believer have the hubris to think her needs deserve special attention in the global schema? I do like the idea of prayer as a way to foreground one’s blessings. It unselfs the self, as the theologian Eugene Peterson would say. (Rhoda Janzen: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (A Memoir of Going Home)).