Thanksgiving 2012 Healing Prayer Exchange

Some of you might recall how last Easter we did The Burning of the Resentments. As we enter this year’s holiday season I thought that together we might try something similar.

I would like us to pray for each other’s healing. So let’s try this.

If you have something from which you would like to be healed—something that for too long or too severely has physically, spiritually, or emotionally compromised the quality of your life—tell us about it. In the comments section below, share as little or as much as you’d like about whatever it is in your soul, mind or body that you would like healed. Ask people to pray for that healing for you. (And remember that you can do that asking as anonymously as you’d like: When it’s time as you’re commenting to put in your name, just use any name you’d like, and do the same with any email you care to make up. Voila: anonymity.)

There’s one condition to your leaving your prayer request. And that is that you must leave a reply to someone else who has left a prayer request, telling them that you will pray for their healing. And then of course you really have to do that; you can’t just say you will.

You can leave a message that you will pray for as many others as you’re moved to, but you must pick at least one other person to pray for. (Ideally, you would first pick someone whom no one else has yet chosen: I don’t want anyone left without anyone to pray for them. ) Again, if you say you’re going to pray for someone’s healing, that’s a serious commitment. So please don’t say it if you’re not going to do it. But with that in mind of course choose to pray for as many as you might.

And of course it’s up to you what does and doesn’t constitute a prayer. But whatever you do, do it like you mean it. Which does of course take a little time, anyway.

And it doesn’t have to be a God-centered, Christian/religion-specific style prayer either, of course. Whatever your version is of sending healing love to someone totally works.

So at least one person will say a prayer for your healing, and you’ll say a prayer for the healing of at least one person.

Then at 9 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Nov. 22—the morning of the day before Thanksgiving Day—I’ll write and publish my group prayer for us all. [Done: it's here.] If you’re free to come to this site at that time and pray with me for all of us, that’d be awesome. It’d be great to know that out there, as I’m being with that prayer as I write it and after I publish it, you are joining me in that experience. (In fact, I’ll start praying over the requests and the writing of my public prayer starting around 8 a.m. that morning; I would especially appreciate your prayers during that time.)

And then each of us, knowing that we have prayed for someone, and that someone has prayed for us, will go thusly fortified into the holiday season.

Thanks ahead of time for those of you who participate in this.

Participating in The Thanksgiving 2012 Healing Prayer Exchange are the good people who run the Facebook page Unfundamentalist Christians, as well as our friends over at The Progressive Christian Alliance. People from both groups are watching, reading, and praying over this all.

Update Tuesday morning: This message just came in from Rev. Roger McClellan, founder of The Progressive Christian Alliance:

In the eyes of the Progressive Christian Alliance John’s vibrant ministry to the marginalized is one that should be affirmed by the Church. It was that position that led us to formally welcome Rev. John Shore as an ordained minister of the PCA. And while John certainly deserves a lot of credit for his willingness to serve this virtual community, you, the readers and commenters here, deserve our deepest gratitude and recognition. For you form this loving and supportive community. So let this Thanksgiving 2012 Healing Prayer Exchange bring balm to the wounded and hurting among us. Let us each pray for one another, both giving and receiving the benefits of such concern.
I pray for you.
You pray for me.
Together we rise.
I could not put it better myself.

[UPDATE: Here's my prayer around/response to everything left here.]