SPCK - Fingertip Tips for Prayer

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Fingertip Tips for Prayer!

If you want to pray for other people, then you might like to practise using this technique:

When you start your prayer, look at one of your hands. As you pray, you can use each digit to ensure you've included everyone who might need to be remembered.

hand Let the thumb point to yourself. Many prayer books and teachers recommend leaving yourself until last, as an act of humility, but the road is littered with failed attempts to do this. Get your own stuff done first and then your mind will be free to think about others more fully. Don't be humble: be realistic and think about talking to God about your needs first.

The index finger is the one that you might point with. So this finger reminds us to pray for those who point the way for us - teachers, ministers, people who help us to live our lives to the best.

The middle finger, nearly always the tallest, is for those who stick out above the crowd in life: politicians (and they surely need our prayer), perhaps those who work in peace-making, and other international people who may be involved in tricky negotiations.

The ring finger is sometimes regarded as the weakest finger, because few of us use it for much. So we remember those who are weak; most of us know about praying for the sick, or those in distress. They are the centre of most ‘arrow prayers,' and the people whom we are conscious of on a day-to-day level.

And finally, the little finger. This is the ‘little people' in the eyes of the world, but no less important in God's eyes; perhaps children, those with little power over the effects of the world on their lives, the people whom Jesus calls us to stand with on a day-to-day basis.

By doing this you should have covered most of the people whom you feel you would like to mention to God.

This approach to prayer can be found in How to Pray by John Pritchard

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