Mightier Than the Pen

“Pray on every occasion, before every post, before every tweet, and before every click to send. Really.”

That was a tweet by @BurkParsons retweeted by my pastor last week.

I saw it and decided if I was really interested in eliminating flippant communication, this was a good place to start. So I mentally assented.

What I didn’t realize was how much praying that would involve. Personal, work, and school email plus Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and blogging adds up to an approximate average of 3,628 prayers a day. That kind of overwhelmed me. However, there were several times this week that I was able to stop and pray before a post and it kept me from doing something stupid.

But this weekend I got impulsive with online communication and inadvertently caused confusion and hurt. It was only after the fact that I remembered I should have prayed first.

Pray before every form of online communication? That sounds pretty radical. Although not quite as radical as praying without stopping. That was the apostle’s Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians in God’s Word. 

Say what? Don’t we have other things to do, too? This section of scripture isn’t saying we should never do anything but pray. It’s referring to a constant attitude of prayer, needed now as much as ever with all of the forms of communication we have today. And sometimes, even often, that attitude does require us to drop what we’re doing and ask God for guidance.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and the web supplies the pen with more speed and scope than ever. We need Divine strength when wielding a weapon with that kind of power.