Hey God It's Me, Carly....sooooo, yeah.

So there's this part of working in ministry where you have to pray in front of people a lot. This is something that I am terrible at doing. Here are some of the better examples:

(Oh, and all of these happened in front of large groups of volunteers)

"...please bless us with open hearts, open minds, and....open hearts...uhhh [awkward pause] wellp, DOUBLE OPEN HEARTS, I guess!"

"Hey God...sooo, what's up?"

"...and thank you for the sunshine, it's really great, we like it. Well I guess also the rain is good 'cause you need it for all your trees and, er, stuff.."

"...please bless the breakfast that was prepared for us. Man, I'm really excited for this french toast. [Realize I said this out loud. Cringe. Decide to go with it.] Sugar is great, so...good job God."

"...and also... [way longer than awkward pause]...uhhh okayyeahamen."

Moral of the story, I'm really, really bad at praying out loud. So bad that now it's actually easy for me because it's kind of a joke and at least I end up making people laugh. Usually I just do my awkward prayer thing and then moonwalk out of the room while people start eating or doing whatever volunteers do.

This week I was sure that the end of my prayer to close orientation (the last one in the list above) made more than one person uncomfortable. But, the next morning one of the volunteers came up to me and said that he has always been afraid to pray in public because he knew he would go blank and not know what to say. He told me that hearing that happen to me was great for him because he realized that it's just about whatever God has planned on your heart to say, and when He's done, you're done.

It's cool because then I'm just weird enough during a prayer that people think "hey, I could probably do that in a way that won't make people want to hide because they feel so strange and non-traditional while listening to this prayer" and then maybe some people will decide to pray because now it's way less pressure. Thinking about it now, I kind of wish that I had been around worse pray-ers when I was younger so that it didn't take me so long to be OK with my own casual way of praying. We're reading a book by Parker Palmer called "Let Your Life Speak." He talks a lot about how to find yourself and has this interesting idea that we should "embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of." Touché, Parker. Watch me embrace my social prayer anxiety and awkwardness. (Here my inner cheerleader interjects with an eloquent "GO 'HEAD! GO 'HEAD GURL!" that we recently heard from a young man, who was not the father, on the Maury show.)

Carly Wheaton: setting the bar low for prayer skills since 2013.

High-five for spiritual leadership!