Welcome to Responding with Prayer,
An opportunity to respond to the complex everyday experiences that lift us up and bring us down.
My name is Jess and I have struggled with attending to prayer,
So I hope this little offering brings you closer to the creator.
Today's meditation is on doomscrolling social media.
To start,
Let's take five big breaths together.
Deep breathing has been studied and found to change how we engage stress and situations.
It is good for slowing down,
Preparing for prayer,
But also a good practice for all kinds of situations we find ourselves in.
So for just one minute,
Feel yourself breathe.
Deep breathing has been studied and found to change how we engage stress and situations.
That was 60 seconds.
If your mind went to other places,
That's natural.
It happens.
It's okay.
And you're still here.
So let's move on.
Take one moment to identify a person or a situation that you are grateful for as you do this today.
And take a moment to,
In your head or out loud,
Express that gratitude towards God.
Getting overwhelmed or apathetic with the state of the world happens to many of us.
Social media contains the most beautiful and most ugly things that life has to offer.
It can be easy to fall into doomscrolling.
Sometimes it's hard to believe what we see.
What is a prayerful response to the doomscroll?
If you're able,
Put out your arms and turn your palms up in a posture of release to the creator.
Our bodies are an important part of prayer.
And the Christian scriptures tell us of a very practical spiritual opportunity.
Cast your cares towards divine.
Imagine you wrote the things that you saw and how they make you feel on the palm of your hands as an act of submission.
What words would be there?
God,
We place into your hands these things on our hands.
We give to you the things we have seen doomscrolling on the internet and their impact they have on our lives.
A lot of meditation teaches our necessary ability to release.
Let's also focus on what are healthy things we put into the spaces that we release.
For releasing the cares of our doomscroll,
What are we taking on?
As you close your hands and pull your arms back to your body,
What are the things you Let's take on peace,
Gentle speak.
Let's take on faith in humanity and hope for the world.
Time can keep us from our purpose because it focuses us on the worst of what humanity has to offer rather than the best of what God has to offer.
However in prayer,
We slow down and make commitments to the core foundations.
Spend a minute expressing to God how the things you have seen on your social media is impacting your life and what freedoms you would like to have.
God bless.
God,
We accept the freedom that comes with submission to you.
So often we fight against the very abundant life that you have to offer us.
So we accept the grace of gentle speak.
We accept the grace of faith in humanity.
We accept the grace of hope for the world.
Taking this time today did not change social media's hold on all of us,
But it may have changed your orientation towards it today.
You may need to take some greater steps to address doom scrolling in your life.
That the great spiritual writers of the Christian tradition have often maintained that prayer's greatest gift is not that it suddenly changes situations,
But that it often changes us.
Amen.
