M Y P R AY E R FA M I LY By Craig Ruhl Growing up, after being too old for daycare, we attended church services with our parents, what we called “big church.” As we entered our teenage years, we also were members of the youth ministry program at the church. Certainly, there was prayer during church services and group meetings, but we did not have fully defined personal prayer lives. Oh, I might add that the bulk of my prayers outside of the church were before, during, and after school exams.
I was honored and blessed to be interviewed this week on the Talking With God podcast hosted by our good friend Scott Dunn. During the interview, Scott asked me about my prayer life and specifically if there was an area in which I struggled with prayer. Full disclosure—Scott gave me a heads-up on what questions I would be asked, so I could prepare in advance. The one aspect of prayer I believe to be most difficult for me is asking for prayer for myself. I’ll talk more about that in a moment. My memory of my youth is that we were taught to pray for others and not specifically for ourselves. Family prayer time for my sisters and me consisted of bedtime prayer, the “now I lay me down to sleep…” type of prayer. We prayed out loud with Mom or Dad as they tucked us into bed. Now that I think about it, my family didn’t pray much, just at bedtime and at holiday meals. My parents were Christian, raised in families where faith was an important part of their lives. My paternal great-grandfather was a Baptist minister and a collegiate teacher of religious studies. Perhaps they came from a more stoic generation where open prayer was not common. 30 | M AG A Z I N E N A M E PAGE 3 29
After coming home from active military service, I limited my church participation to occasionally going to Sunday services with my mom and dad, especially at Christmas and Easter. Over the years, there were also several church weddings and a few memorial services. I have never actually attended a funeral service. For much of my life, I did not belong to a church, and I wasn’t much of a Bible reader or prayerful person at all. Fast forward to when I met my wife, Karen. I was fifty-one years old when Karen, her son, Chris, and I became a family. Shortly afterward, we began going to church regularly. We were now members of a unique family—the church. Besides regular Sunday services, we became active in small study groups. Chris was active in youth fellowship programs. This period was the first that I had been exposed to corporate prayer. The concept of people, many strangers, holding hands and praying together was foreign to me and quite unsettling at first. “Again, I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:19-20 NKJV)
