Prayer and Character

This morning brought me to thinking about my prayer life, again. In a recent post I pondered and tried to wrap my head around addressing the Lord in prayer and making prayer time more than using His name just as a pronouncement to begin a laundry list of physical ailments, money concerns, etc.
Today, I would like to address those prayer concerns that deal with everyday life that we all come up with. Of course God cares about them and He wants us to talk to Him about those them. However, in our culture, I think we are missing the boat (for the most part) when it comes to these things. Having been in prayer groups all across the country, I think I can confidently say that as a whole, we don't generally  pray for the character of the people in those situations. {Which makes the HUGE assumption that we are praying for others and that we are offering to others personal prayer requests that have to do with our own lives. But that is another post for another time}
The following is a list of character qualities, in no particular order, which are cobbled together from three different places (Galatians 5 , 2 Peter 1, Romans 12), combining certain words when repeated:
"Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-Control, Moral Excellence, Knowledge, Perseverance, Godliness, Humility, Hope, Wisdom, Abhorring Evil, Diligence, Fervent Spirit, Servitude, Rejoicing, Devotion to Prayer, Giving, Hospitality, Blessing Persecutors, Empathy, Unity, Being Teachable, Overcoming evil with good."
It excites me to see how invigorating my prayer life becomes when character becomes the focus. When we pray for people's character, certain things happen:

• We aren't fixated on the situation's outcome, but rather the personal development of the people involved.
• We can be an encouragement by letting people know how we are praying for their character in any given situation. This communicates a deeper authenticity of our love for them, which trumps the all too often automatic canned utterance, "I've been praying for you."
  
• We become more acutely aware of our own character strengths and weaknesses and these then become action points (and dare I say it... "prayer requests to give to others") in our own walk with the Lord.

Let me challenge you to be devoted to praying for the character of the people around you for a week. Let me know how that goes in the days that follow.