Prayer Beads & Intercession

During a time I could not pray, I purchased a set of Anglican prayer beads.

It was—or seemed—a random and somewhat impulsive purchase.  I am not Anglican, though I have great respect for the Anglican church and those who are a part of it.  Really, I bought them because I wanted something with the tactile utility of a rosary that didn’t feel inappropriate since…well, I wasn’t actually praying the rosary.  Mainly, I just wanted something meaningful to touch when I prayed without accidentally doing something offensive.

At the time, my mind was in a whirl over…well, who knows what?  Anxiety comes and goes for me with planes and life changes and difficult circumstances.  But I couldn’t settle down to pray. Every time I tried, my brain went haywire.  And even my usual alternative—sticking to the Jesus prayer, or the Lord’s prayer, or something familiar—didn’t work.  The words turned into rote babble in my head.  I wasn’t really praying them at all.

Paying attention to what’s around me or in front of me often calms me down in these states.  And so I got the beads with the hopes they might serve as a means of focus.  To my delight, they did.  I didn’t use them always, or sometimes even often, but when need demanded and my thoughts wouldn’t stop circling I picked it up and was able to use the feel of the beads in my fingers to reorient myself to prayer. 

The beads came and went in use.  When I wasn’t using them, the elegant little beads with the dangling cross hung from the strap of my Bible cover.  They have traveled with me overseas, tucked into my carry-on.   They came to my mother’s funeral.  They have seen many tears and much gratitude.

But of late I’ve started to use them for a new purpose: intercession.

Before I explain why, I want to tell a seemingly unrelated story.  (I will make the connection clear, I promise).  Here’s the topic: I own an electric toothbrush.  And yes, everything people tell you about an electric toothbrush is true.  It cleans teeth much better and more efficiently!  It whitens  It can do all sorts of cool things!

It also beeps to make sure you’re brushing enough.

In other words, when you start brushing your teeth with this thing you essentially divide your teeth into four quadrants: upper front, upper back, lower front, lower back.  You brush each one for a certain amount of time until the toothbrush beeps, and then you switch.  I think the whole process supposedly takes two minutes, and it matches recommendations for best practices regarding how you ought to brush your teeth.

You know what?  It is a really long time to brush your teeth.

I was brushing improperly before!  I was so lazy, and I didn’t even know it.  I thought I did brush for two minutes.  Reader, I was not.  I wasn’t even brushing for ten seconds probably.  No wonder my teeth feel cleaner.  I wasn’t granting the process the amount of time it deserved.

And so with intercessory prayer.

I grew up in a church culture where intercessory prayer was often tossed-off and quick, a curious manifestation of the injunction to pray without ceasing.  “God,” the pastor would intone from the pulpit after hearing the list of prayer requests, “be with Mary’s uncle, and Todd’s daughter, and little Tanya’s bake sale.”

And that was it.

I mean, sure, we sometimes did longer intercessory prayers—usually when someone was very, very sick or a tragedy had occurred.  Those could be hours-long vigils, with kneeling people praying in shifts.  But most intercessory prayer looked something like this:

God take care of [something.]

Lord, [act in some way for this person].

God, remember [name].

And there’s not anything wrong necessarily with this.  Sincere sentence prayers are as good as any other sort of prayer.  But for me, personally, the result was that I became very casual in intercession.  So casual that I didn’t really give it much thought.  In fact, it became very easy for me to discharge concerns to God and then literally never think of them again.

Enter the prayer beads.

Prayer beads demand a slower form of praying.  Using them demands that you take your attention off whatever you are doing—like typing or scrolling your phone—to use them.  And then you go slowly, touching each bead.  Sometimes I say the same prayer for the same person for each bead.  But more often I find myself inspired to pray a lot of different things.  “Lord, be with Jacob’s family during his doctor’s appointment” turns into “grant peace to Jacob’s wife” and “strengthen Jacob’s grown children” and “give the doctor discernment” and “have mercy on all of us sinners” and “strengthen our faith to believe you can heal.”

The experience then transforms me in turn, both because I’ve taken more time to spend with God and because in some small way I’ve tried to sacrifice my time and my selfishness for someone else.  Doesn’t make the prayer more valid than a sincere sentence spoken aloud by a believer, but it does force me into being much less casual about the way I pray for others.

And I do it, mostly, because this is how I wish others would pray for me.

When I’m hurting, I don’t want my need to be a tick-box on a list of intercessory requests.  I don’t want people to forget about me once they’ve turned me over to God.  I want to know they spent the time to care and to really reach out to God.  If intercession is to knock on the door, as Scripture tells us, I want people to bang on it with both fists, not jiggle a knob and wander off.

There’s not always time, of course.  And sometimes need doesn’t merit it.  When someone asks me to pray they get a good parking space for Grandma at the concert, I’ll admit I don’t sit down with my beads and rend open the doors of heaven.  But more often than not, I find myself setting aside the time—not just for the really intense severe asks, but the more quotidian ones.

In the end it helps me, too.