WOW – Prayers of Intercession

“All prayer begins with listening. And God is a good listener. … Intercession means to speak up for someone else. To use our words to help someone, or something. We know how to speak up for them because we listen to them.” – Liv Larson Andrews

“Sound’s role from the first days of the cosmos through the long, fruitful path of biological evolution, has always been to connect. Connection creates new possibility. And so, despite being fugitive and ephemeral, sound is generative. To listen, then, is to be open to the vitality and creativity of life, not as a metaphor or mystical insight, but as a sensory connection to the physical and biological processes that lifted life and song from the earth. We are recipients from deep time of sound’s diversity and creative potential. … The spoken word can unify us into collective action. Listening expands the bounds of kinship, joy, and right action.” -from When Earth Started to Sing, a 40-minute sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell

Welcome to Day 21 of the Wonders of Worship (WOW) series. Today we ponder the Prayers of Intercession.

My son, Paul Drees, is an ELCA pastor who goes live for a Q&A every Monday night (9pm Central) on TikTok. One of the things that people are drawn to is his practice of receiving prayer requests throughout the hour. At the conclusion of the Live, he offers a prayer lifting up all the requests, many being prayers of intercession. Most Monday nights a little after 10:00, I’m already in bed with my phone on the nightstand, listening to the prayers before drifting off to sleep.

Ways to Engage:

Practice Visio Divina (receive, reflect, respond, rest) with the painting.
Download the B&W image. Color it on your own or with a friend. Color in silence or while listening to the sonic journey linked above. Let it inspire further contemplation/conversation.
You do you. Trust your intuition and engage in the way your heart desires.

WOW Tree of Life Painting – Here’s the blank canvas and the underpainting. Most of the paint applied today will be covered over, but it’s still an important part of the process. (I guess you could think of it like underwear!) 🙂

To download the black and white image for personal use: on a computer, click and drag the image to your desktop; on a phone, press on the picture until it gives you the option to save it to your photos. The image is formatted to fit on an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper, but feel free to print it whatever size you’d like.

Background: I created a series of forty 5″x7″ watercolor paintings inspired by the elements of worship. It was work commissioned by a project with Nourishing Vocation with Children at St. Olaf College, a program funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.

As the paintings are shared, you may notice a pattern: