Prayer
“All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.” – Acts 1:14
Before I retired, we hired many people to work on our team. There just are not a lot of people who had the skillset in the U.S. to choose from, but that is okay because only a few types of employers hire them. My company was a health insurer and, for the most part, that was the predominant employer of this position.
What does that mean? If I had a programmer job open at the State, for example, I might be able to hire a programmer from Hills Pet food to come work for me. That, hiring someone locally, doesn’t happen very often for health actuaries. In this area, almost all the specialists work for the same company. So, an opening means one of two things - hiring someone out of college that wants to pursue a career or hiring someone from, potentially, a long way away. I, for example, was brought in from Wisconsin. My boss, at the time, was from Idaho or California (it’s been too long to remember exactly). The point is it was expensive for the company to hire us.
The process usually is this. The HR department (Human Resources), tries and fails to find candidates (they have good local sources but not so good non-local resources). We contact one or more recruiters (or head hunters as we called them). Their whole life is trying to make contacts with employed skilled positions and trying to be the middle person to get them a new job somewhere else. These recruiters get a good hunk of cash for a new employee placed (25% of first year’s salary, paid by the hiring company). Recruiters, once they know you have an opening and are willing to work with them, will be glad to help find candidates for you to review. So, you get several resumes, weed through them to identify, say, 10 or so candidates that you’d like to do a telephone interview with, telephone interview them and decide which 2 or 3 you’d like to bring in for an in-person interview. This includes paying for airfare, hotel, meals for these candidates. So, it’s expensive.
But back to the telephone interviews. Many times, we would break up the telephone interview pool among several people and get back together to review and decide who to bring in. We would usually decide on standard list of telephone questions so we could compare responses when we got back together. One of the questions I got asked, in my telephone interview, was to list my strengths and weaknesses. I don’t remember what I replied but, knowing me, it was guarded honesty (as it likely is for most people). You know, emphasize your strength and minimize your weaknesses.
This morning, my external devotion, was on prayer. If I was asked by God to list my strengthens and weaknesses, I know, for sure, that one of my weaknesses would have to be prayer. I am jealous listening to Patrick and many others pray with the congregation. The words and thoughts come out so smoothly. When I have prayed out loud for others, I feel jerky and not eloquent.
This devotion spoke to me as my faith walk has been moving me in the direction of thinking of prayer as pouring out my heart to God in praise, petition, confession of sin, and thanksgiving (if I was writing an academic paper, I’d have to footnote and let the reader know that I got this from today’s Crossway devotion of 3/3/2025). These just happen to be four elements from the catechism. The author suggested praying and using these four elements to define the outline of your prayer. He went on to create an example to illustrate the point that I didn’t find illuminated it more.
But the connection with secular hiring is true. Be honest, and unlike secular hiring, be open with God. What I am finding, slowly, is that the more I pray in front of others, the more comfortable I am doing it. My heart aches to pour itself out to God, I must get my introverted mind out of the way.
