Fake Prayer
S aying something against prayer seems like a bad thing to do, but recently I have had a few reminders that prayer isn’t always a good thing. I saw a blog post recently about “praying the Psalms.” I’ve often wondered if God bothers to listen to prayers that people read out of a book or have memorized. The Psalms are great for meditation and if that leads someone to pray about something personal that’s great, but I sometimes get the impression that people think they can use prayers written by other people as some form of incantation. It doesn’t work that way. Somehow I get drawn into some of the strangest discussions. The other day Michael Hyatt had a post on his blog about the tension we authors experience concerning self-promotion. I disagreed with the guest blogger and she took far greater offense at what I said than what I could have anticipated. She had included the words of one of her fans and had disagreed with that fan. I basically said that I thought the fan was right, so some...