Pray, not Prey

Spelling and grammar have gone down the tubes. I'm not pointing fingers, I do it too; in my last post I put affect where I should have used effect. When I noticed it this morning I almost fixed it but I decided against it. I decided against it to remind myself just how important the small things are.

Perfectionism is a disease most will suffer from at some point in life. I have mentioned I have a pretty good case of it. I think it is common for the depressed and bipolar among us to tend toward perfectionism. Being an artist, I hang out with a lot of artists and study great artists. There is a common thread that most, especially the best-of-the-best, tend toward perfectionism and mood problems. I'm not sure which comes first or which feeds the other, but I'm pretty sure it is rare they are mutually exclusive.

One thing I have noticed, being a perfectionist, I tend to notice the grammar, spelling, and misuse of words. In doing so I've seen some appalling errors, but I have seen some truly hilarious things too.

I remember receiving an email once that made me literally laugh, which was quite awkward while waiting on a funeral to begin. A co-worker's wife was going in for a kidney and liver transplant when my boss sent out an email to notify the team. He was kind and thoughtful and asked any of us who would to "prey" for the co-worker and his wife. Now forget the irony of being at a funeral while praying for someone's transplant to go well (for all I know she was getting this dead dude's liver and kidney), all I can think of is "preying" for someone.

Pray and prey are homophones; they sound the same. Problem is they mean something really different. I know what my boss meant, but now I'm thinking of the spelling and the predator/prey mentality. All I can do is think of myself stalking some game in the wilds of northern Alabama to bring meat back to Tennessee for my co-worker and his soon-to-be-on-the-mend wife. I'm sitting there with a completely inappropriate case of the giggles while other members of my family are weeping.

Is it some sickness to notice those things and be inappropriate? Probably, but I think it's fairly obvious that I'm not bashful about acknowledging my ill nature. Once all the morbid giggling settled off I thought about it some more. Often when we pray we are simply desiring we not become prey; prey of illness, prey of enemies, prey of mistakes, prey of whatever. We have every desire to be predator and not prey.

There isn't anything wrong with praying not to be prey. The Lord's Prayer, Jesus' model of how to pray, specifically petitions the Lord in heaven to "Lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." He is specifically showing us that we should ask to be the victims of our world. It is not a problem to not want to be prey.

The question then becomes is whether we should seek to be predators? We want everything to be black and white, it's our nature, but there are alternatives to victimizing our enemies. In the same model prayer, before asking God to deliver us, Jesus asks His father to forgive our sin "...as we forgive those who sin against us." How much does that wreck our typical thought process? Forgive our predators? Forgive those that would make us prey? How unlike us to do such a thing.

So it boils down to this, my prayer this holiday is to make peace with the times I become prey while desiring not to be prey unnecessarily. Over and over I have said I believe I have this illness so I can share with others that they aren't alone. If continuing to suffer with being its prey is something I can forgive, and the Lord forgive me of, then be it so. What predators can we all overcome and what makes us prey from which we asking to be relieved?