Inside Out Living

This morning I heard on K-Love about a newly proposed application for all of you iPhone users called "A Note to God." The application was designed by a Sacramento area teen named Allen Wright who thought the idea up when he was lying in bed and feeling lonesome. The concept is simple, you text your throught or prayer 'to God' where it is stored on a database. The app also allows you to view others' prayers and show your support of the prayers by clicking on a thumbs up.

I don't really want to discourage Allen from using his creativity in his efforts to exercise his faith, but I have a few concerns about some unintended consequences of this app. I don't plan on using the app myself, primarily because I don't have an iPhone nor plan on getting one, but also because I don't see it as necessary.

I understand the goal to be to give people an outlet for their prayers, to create a community of prayer, and to be able to pray for others' prayer requests that are posted (of course it is all anonymous). However as the Rev. James Murphy, who was quoted in the Sacramento Bee article, said, "Prayer is direct to God, and God should be the primary motive...If the motive is to be seen by others, be careful. There's a sense in which prayer is private." Now I do believe in corporate or group prayer and that there is nothing wrong with sharing prayer requests, but he danger of praying in groups or in public is praying to gain the approval of those around you. This is the first concern that I have is that the feature that allows people to state their approval of the prayer sets people up to be praying for the approval of others and not to connect or petition God himself. This is what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for in Matthew 6:5, "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full."

The other concern that I have probably has something to do with my understanding of the grip that technology has on our culture. This may have something to do with the fact that I am old enough to remember when my family got our first home computer, when we first connected to the internet, and when we still used rotary phones, and cell phones were the size of bricks. Will God honestly hear and answer a prayer that is sent to a database somewhere in California. Is that seriously a prayer? Will people become dependent upon technology to prayer and forget that they can pray anytime anywhere regardless of their battery life or cell coverage. If a prayer becomes deleted from the database does that mean it is now invalid? I know I am getting a little scarcastic here but this are just some of the questions that I think about in reading this story.

Now I have to admit this isn't all that different than what myself and others are already doing on facebook and twitter. How much different is it really than the written prayers of the great spiritual fathers who have gone before us? I have typed prayers on both those applications and so they have been read by others. Some of them are responses of prayer for others and some are just expressions of what God has put on my heart. So maybe this whole rant has been hypocritical, I don't know. I like to think that when I have typed the prayers that the typed message is more for the benefit of the reader, not for God. God already knows my thoughts and my needs before the words even leave my mouth or my fingers hit the keyboard. So I guess this is my conclusion. The prayer is my personal communication with God (whether that is said internally or externally), the writing of the prayer down is not the prayer itself, but a record of it that is intended to benefit others or help them in their spiritual journey.