8AM is early. Go figure. It's not like I'm not used to it; I get up for 8AM lab every Tuesday and Thursday. No, I don't think the tiredness gets to me until I'm in the middle of prayer trying to focus on words to pray in accordance to God's will. Which didn't happen.
I grabbed my backpack and guitar and stepped out into the rain. My thoughts as I was walking? Who will come? To be frank (and Diane knows this), since Diane was the only one I was pushing to come and she had not answered my three phone calls before I left, I was bracing myself to be strumming my guitar in the open, empty hall of the Math Atrium. Lo and behold, the only person that came was.... Diane! Thank you for coming :)
That changed things a little bit. I had forgotten to remind everyone to bring a Bible in an email for prayer meetings because it would help with the nature of how I wanted the meeting to go (but luckily Diane brought hers anyway). I had scheduled the prayer meeting to go for two hours in the morning because I knew it would be hard for people come at 8, but at the same time I wanted to leave the option open for people who had to get up early for work or class to be able to come in and be a part of the meeting. This is what I'm saying when I say, "Are we doing everything we can to make it easy for people to come?" 8AM Mark? That's not easy at all. Well simply put, I'm quite selfish and my schedule would go 8AM/10AM-9PM most weekdays if I were to schedule prayer meetings at night. Waking up at 8AM is also disciplining me for IVLI since wake up is at 7:15AM on cedar campus (everyday)... But otherwise, that is why we scheduled a second prayer meeting for Saturdays at 10AM-12PM (or 11AM-12PM) so that anyone can make it out to that (except Kelli Strong :P).
So having only Diane there meant we could discuss verses that we were reading for our QT while we were there. I started off by saying that I want to do a theme of Psalms for worship. I love the nature of the lyrics that David writes for his worship. Many times we hold back a lot of our emotions when we pray to God because we feel that we don't think it's right to ask God for such selfish requests. David thinks otherwise. One verse that I read recently was Psalm 6:5 - "Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?" Before this verse, David sings, "Turn, O Lord, and deliver me. Save me with your unfailing love!" for God to save him from his enemies. He is basically saying, "Look God, save me from my enemies. If you want me to praise you, how can I do that if I'm dead?" I think David's nature in Psalms reflects what a believer's worship should feel like. There is an intimacy in his words, an acknowledgement of the Creator and King, and there is a closeness felt with his Savior. Although we might not be able to relate to some of his Psalms (stop me if you yourself have been attacked by neighboring nations and your enemies have closed in on you), we are still able to see how David prays and how he worships.
I have not dived too deep into Psalms before, but I plan on reading it constantly everyday (and IVLI's morning devos are in Psalms! Yuhss!). I want to explore how David prayed and how David worshipped God and I feel that using our prayer meeting to go through some Scripture is an excellent way to do it. Our worship can be done using many of Psalms' lyrics because artists today write songs that come from Psalms! Hopefully this study in Psalms during prayer meetings will be fruitful for our chapter's prayer culture.
David and his harp.
I plan on not leading the Saturday meetings, so you guys can lead however you want! I know I will be going through Psalms on Wednesday mornings and the praying will be pretty free, but Saturday meetings can run like this past year's DPMs. That's all I got for now....
Hope all is well!
PS. David isn't our character that we're studying. We still need to choose one. Any suggestions?
PPS. I will hopefully have selected a book by the end of memorial weekend!
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