Movie Pray

[Arleen Smelko]

Anew prayer session is produced every day of the working week and one session for the weekend. It is not a 'Thought for the Day"", a sermon or a bible-study, but rather a framework for your own prayer.

I am deeply thankful for the gift of prayer, which is surely among the greatest of gifts given by our Father in Heaven to His children on earth. Prayer is the ordained means by which men and women, and even little children, come to know God. It is our channel of communication with heaven. It is a priceless privilege.

The Lord desires that we speak with Him openly, honestly, and in plain, simple words. Any attempt at pretense in prayer is pointless, for the Lord knows our hearts perfectly; indeed, insincerity in prayer can become a subtle form of hypocrisy.

If we examine our personal prayers carefully, we may discover that we often say things we do not really mean or even desire. We are not praying truthfully. The best corrective to this is to focus on the words and phrases we use in prayer and make sure we mean what we say. It also helps to set aside adequate time for prayer so as not to be rushed; to couple prayer with meditation; and to pray, if possible, in a place of quiet solitude.

When we truly pray from the heart, we open our innermost feelings to our Father in Heaven: we tell Him of our challenges, our feelings of inadequacy and weakness; we share our emotions and feelings about decisions that face us or trials and adversity we experience; we freely express our sorrows and joys. Now, God knows our innermost thoughts and feelings even better than we do, but as we learn to share them with Him, we make it possible for His Spirit to enter our souls and teach us more about our own selves and about the nature of God. By making ourselves totally honest, open, and submissive before God, our hearts become more receptive to His counsel and His will.

Notice that revelation comes both in the heart and in the mind. The feelings of the heart and the understanding of the mind come together to give us an answer. If we have a good feeling, but our minds are unsettled, we should continue to study and pray. If in our mind we have developed a plan of action that makes sense but does not feel right, we may not yet have the answer. Only when heart and mind are in accord can we be confident that we have reached the right conclusion.

When you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon . . . ; and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation. [Teachings, 151]

Now, brothers and sisters, sometimes circumstances will arise in our lives when we face an urgent need for divine guidance and have neither the time to study it out nor any possible way of learning more about what course we should take. In such circumstances the Lord will surely guide us if we are open to the promptings and impressions of the Spirit.

In the summer of 1976 I spent two months in the Soviet Union with 150 other American students studying Russian. When the program ended late in July, we were given a week free to travel at our own expense anywhere in Europe before catching a charter flight from Paris back to the United States. I spent that week on a shoestring budget visiting friends and converts in the Dsseldorf Germany Mission, where I had earlier served.

I do not remember much of that night, only that I felt safe and very blessed. The next morning I learned that the bus to Charles de Gaulle Airport stopped right in front of the hotel. To my great relief the fare was only $3. I arrived at the airport in time to catch my flight to JFK Airport, where, with only a few small coins left in my pocket, I was met by my beloved fiance, Susan.

I testify that He will bless and be merciful to you, too, as you seek Him in prayer. I know that God the Eternal Father lives. I know that His Son is our Redeemer. I was eighteen years old when I first received a pure witness by the power of the Holy Ghost that Jesus Christ is a living being, a real person, my friend and support in every time of need. In the intervening years I have come to know that the fruits of the Spirit are joy beyond expression and a deep inner peace that passes all understanding.

Jesus was saying in Matthew 6:7 that we must not regard prayer as some kind of magical incantation, for that is how pagans pray. They recite certain phrases over and over again, with no understanding of what the words mean. In these contexts, prayers are used as mantras, with the hope that they will change the environment or the circumstances in which a person lives. New Age thinking is filled with this type of thing. Jesus did not commend such exercises as godly forms of prayer; rather, He linked the use of vain repetitions to paganism.

Christians can easily fall into a pattern of praying in a repetitious fashion, without engaging their minds. It bothers me sometimes when Christians gather for a meal and the host will say to someone there, "John, will you please say the grace for us?" The host doesn't ask for someone to lead in prayer but to say the grace. That kind of language suggests a mere recitation, not a prayer that comes from the heart.

Jesus did not give the Lord's Prayer with the intention that it would be repeated mindlessly. When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we need to pray it thoughtfully, giving attention in our minds to its content. It is not a mantra to be repeated without the engagement of the mind or heart. It is an example of godly prayer.

Of course, repetition has great value. I've often said that one of my favorite liturgies in the life of the church is the traditional marriage ceremony. You've heard it many times: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here today in the presence of God and of these witnesses to unite this man and this woman in the holy bonds of marriage, which was instituted by God," and so it goes. It's a very brief service. It contains pledges, vows, charges, and prayers. For me, the more often I lead this liturgy or hear it, the more blessed I am by the content of it. That is, the more familiar I become with the language, the more I think about it and meditate on it, and I see afresh how rich it is in explaining to us the sanctity of marriage. So it is with the Lord's Prayer. Hearing it over and over again may lead us to mindless repetition, but it also may burn these words, and the underlying principles, into our minds. Repetition in and of itself is not a bad thing. In fact, it's one of the most important ingredients of learning, because it's the rare person who masters a concept or a principle by hearing it once.

There is nothing like physical pain to drive you to your knees in prayer. For 20 years, I was plagued by crippling back pain and sciatica. Time after time, I cried out to God for His healing power on my body, but nothing improved. Even as a prayer warrior, I grew weary in going to God about the same thing day in and day out.

One of the hardest challenges of the Christian walk is waiting for God to answer our prayers when we urgently need Him to intervene in a circumstance that is breaking our heart, testing our faith, and robbing us of peace and joy. I have been on my knees many times with my Bible in hand, tearfully reminding God of His promises when my husband and I were in a financial crisis, a friend was stricken with a life-threatening disease, or one of my children was in trouble.

And for years, many of my prayers have been centered on my own need for a miracle. In 2017, after 20 years of pain, I had back surgery to un-pinch my spinal cord, replace deteriorated discs, and straighten my back. The surgery was the answer to my prayers in many ways. I am grateful every day that I can now walk without leg pain and do many of the things I love, like working in my garden, standing long enough to bake cookies with my granddaughter, and traveling to speak for World Vision. However, the trauma to the nerves in my back is taking much longer to heal, and I continue to cry out to God.

At the time, I worked full-time in the pro-life movement as the director of a non-profit I started, weDignify. So, by day I would save lives, by night I would remind you to pray! Annie was a local news producer.

Ars Nova & National Black Theatre debut! Broadway: Mean Girls, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. National Tours: Hamilton: An American Musical, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, RENT. Television: Dear Edward (Apple TV+), The Other Two (HBO). Her original music is available for streaming on all digital music platforms. Grateful to be here.

JJJJJerome Ellis is an animal, stutterer, and artist. He was raised by Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants in Tidewater, VA, where he prays, gardens, and resides among the egrets and asters. Through music, literature, performance, and video he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. He dreams of building a sonic bath house!

Jadele McPherson is an artist-scholar currently in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. McPherson founded Lukumi Arts in 2008, an Afro-Cuban arts experimental theater company. In 2021 McPherson produced the Afro-Latinx artist series: Mind, Body & Soul, and also performed in Yoruba Soy with Pedrito Martinez at Carnegie Hall; Rebirthing Yemaya by Beatrice Capote and Wake Up: Liberation Call at Dawn with Abigail DeVille at the Hirshhorn Museum.

The Telsey Office/ Destiny Lilly, CSA With offices in both New York and Los Angeles, The Telsey Office casts for theater, film, television, and commercials. The Telsey Office is dedicated to creating safe, equitable, and anti-racist spaces through collaboration, artistry, heart, accountability, and advocacy.

Michelle Cole, MA (she/her) is an educator, choreographer, dancer, scholar, and mother. She is an adjunct faculty and advisor at NYU committed to centering dances and empowering voices of the African diaspora. She has performed on stages from Radio City Music Hall to the National Theater of Kampala in Uganda. In 2020, she established Dance Culture LLC to revolutionize dance education. She was honored as the 2020 NYSDEA Teaching Artist of the Year.

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