To be practical or to be prayerful?

It's an old question, whether one should try to solve the practical problem, or whether one should pray about it. And most Christians everywhere in most ages have known instinctively what the answer is: one should do both, often simultaneously, and often recognizing that praying is doing, and doing is praying. And my heart aches for my Coventry friends who are losing their jobs right now because of Big Government decisions. I would love to be in a position to fix this practically. I can't imagine how, so I pray.

But sometimes the question sneaks past us without us recognizing it. Do we need vision, or do we need pragmatic administration? Organizational rotas, or spontaneity? "Now we've got the administration out of the way, we can get down to things that matter." A wise person I know once said, No vision without implementation. There's cheap vision, just like there's cheap grace, and there's the other kind which gets involved, does the detail, sees it through to the end. The Incarnation seems to be a strong hint as to what is God's preferred option.

I thought about prayer versus practice at the start of the week, when I met the other wardens for an informal evening meeting to sort out some minor practical points. I didn't know the style, so I had no idea what to expect. Practically before we got the tea cups in our hands, there we were praying, and practically before we'd finished praying, there we were talking routine business, and no way were we going to end before we'd prayed for each others' practical concerns and real needs. I think I'm going to like working with this group.

Here's a movie clip which works for me as a summary of what praying versus practice is all about:

(youtube clip)

(and the rest of the film makes it even clearer).