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Our pastor has encouraged us to pray through our church membership list, using our church phone directory, which is available to members only. The idea is to pray for one church member or church family per day in the directory, so there aren't any church members you forget to pray for. A nice side benefit is it helps me to get familiar with all the names of the church members, including those I don't spend a lot of time with.
The parts I found troublesome though was praying through an alphabetic directory, and keeping track of where I was in the list. Often I would lose my bookmark or otherwise forget which page I was on. And things would get confusing if I had to add or modify pages in the directory. Of course, I could use checklists or calendars, but I wanted something with less overhead. Then it occurred to me: why not just write an emacs function that gives me a random member name each day? This is easy to do using shell-command and a call to the "sort" program.
(defvar path-to-membership-prayer-list "~/Documents/membership-prayer-list.txt")
(defun random-member ()
(interactive)
(shell-command (concat "sort -R "
path-to-membership-prayer-list
" | head -n 1")))
I just call M-x random-member and then a name appears in the message area.
First I needed to get the membership list in a text file, with one entry per line. Fortunately, the membership list was already available in PDF format, so this required only some copy-and-paste, plus a little bit of macro-driven Emacs editing to remove unwanted data.
I suppose it might sound strange asking your computer who to pray for, but if our randomness algorithm is halfway decent, then eventually everyone gets covered, while also getting a fair proportion of prayer time. And it is nice to be surprised sometime and see how the random selection interacts with divine providence, sometimes bringing to mind people who had recently shared prayer requests or had some special need.
The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the LORD.
— Proverbs 16:33 (NASB 1995)
"Lots" in the Bible is the Hebrew גורל, referring to small stones or other objects which were thrown or dropped in order to make a decision, similar to how dice or a coin might be used today.
I don't use this approach to pray for missionaries, because I pray for each missionary family after their prayer letter arrives in my inbox.
This work © 2024 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.