Sacred Healing

“Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!”

I spent a week at Wesley Woods High School Camp recently with a large group of teenagers and every morning and evening we sang. (Don’t worry, we were outside and a strong majority were vaccinated!) We sang contemporary worship songs by the fire with guitars and we sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella. One of our staff members shared with me that he was not much of a singer, but for some reason, the singing drove him to tears (he’s also not much of a crier). A most memorable moment of singing came on the Friday Night after party. We strung lights and lit up balloons by the lake front at midnight and had a Par-ty! And when a certain Taylor Swift tune came on, every kid on the shore belted it out word for word. These were all acts of prayer. I don’t know if they all consciously knew they were acts of prayer, but I am clear that God was there in those moments. It was prayer. It was also prayer when we stopped and listened to the bullfrogs in the evening when the sun went down and then again when we covered a slip-n-slide with shaving cream (yes…). Prayer is singing and prayer is listening, as author Kristen Johnson Ingram reminds us. This week in worship we will look at moments when scripture points us to this truth, and examine how we can set an intention of prayer in our singing, our listening and in our playing.