Some Monday Morning Humor

If you’re in need of some Monday morning humor, here’s a good read from Jon Acuff (What Christians Like) on prayer sneak attacks.

I used to be a mailman.

My wife disagrees. She doesn’t feel one summer of delivering mail qualifies me to claim “I used to be a mailman,” but she’s never enlisted in the United States Postal Service. She’s never driven a jeep with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. She’s never worn the badge of the red, white and blue and doesn’t understand that once you join, you are forever a letter carrier. To this day, I’m required by law to egg the UPS guy when he brings Amazon packages to our house. What can brown do for me? Brown can get egged. I’ve already said too much.

But if I were forced to rewrite the sentence, “I used to be a mailman,” I would rewrite it to say:

“I used to be a horrible mailman.”

That sentence is now accurate, because I was one of the worst mailman in the history of the postal service. My greatest fault, of the many I brought to that summer, was my speed. I was really slow at delivering mail, so much so that at the end of the day, I had to sprint and jump off of porches to try to get back to the post office with all the outgoing mail.

But my slowness wasn’t always my fault. One day, I was late because of a prayer sneak attack and that is a day firmly lodged in my memory.

I was walking up a driveway on a hot July day in Framingham, Massachusetts when I saw the homeowner watering his yard with a house. I had never met him before, (unlike that family who let me use their bathroom after I made the rookie mailman mistake of eating a steak and cheese sandwich from a vending machine at the post office. Who could have known that thing would be bad? And how awkward is it for the mailman to come in and use your bathroom?) I handed him the mail, we talked about the weather and then he laid his sweaty hand on my sweaty shoulder and started praying.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, prayer sneak attack. I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to pray too? Was he the opener and I was the closer? Should I bow my head? Were my mailman skills so horrible he felt compelled to pray? Should I close my eyes?

I was so surprised that I just stood there while this stranger prayed on me and then I walked back to the jeep and continued to be a completely mediocre mailman.

What’s the protocol in a situation like that? Could we come to some sort of bylaws or something? It’s going to happen again. And when it does, here are the three things I hope my prayer sneak attacker knows:

3 Rules of Prayer Sneak Attacks

1. Please segue.

“It sure is hot out today. Dear Jesus, watch over this mailman.” See what just happened there? No segue. No spiritual, “here it comes.” No, “get ready because I am about to bring the noise and/or the funk.” Even a simple, “Do you mind if I pray for you” would have been delightful. Let’s all commit to segues whenever possible.

2. Please consider carefully your touching policy.

I didn’t really care that the guy touched my shoulder. I mean it was there, it’s a pretty nice shoulder, flat and able to amply provide a platform for a praying hand. But sometimes when people “reach out and pray” they touch more than a shoulder. My friend’s wife was at a dinner party when a woman sneak attacked her and laid prayer hands on her pregnant belly. Your call on this one, but please know that if you unexpectedly prayer touch my friend Jesse who teaches Krav Maga, the Israeli fighting technique, he is probably going to arm bar you and possibly gouge out one of your eyes. Your left eye if I had to guess. And then I’m going to need to pray that you’ll find a really cool eye patch or a glass eye.

3. Please have met me once before.

I think prayer is a really intimate thing. To pray with someone you are essentially saying, “Hey, let’s go before the creator of the universe right now and be vulnerable to His word and love together.” That’s a lot to ask of your mailman. So let’s at least have talked about the weather once or football or something. Let’s have at least met once before and started to build a relational platform before you grab my hand and say, “Let’s jump off this cliff into the chasm of God’s love in prayer you strange, horrible mailman.”

Those are the three rules I would throw out for prayer sneak attacks, but unfortunately the Holy Spirit has this crazy habit of not playing by my rules. I’m not sure if it just doesn’t read blogs or have Stuff Christians Like on it’s RSS feed, but the Holy Spirit tends to move in mysterious ways. It might tell you, “Grab this mailman and pray for him, right now, right here.”

And then what can you do? But if it didn’t, if your prayer sneak attack is not Holy Spirit, God on high sanctioned, at least give the recipient the benefit of a segue.

Have you ever been prayer sneak attacked?

Have you ever been prompted to bust out a prayer sneak attack on someone?