Sometimes I like to think I’m pretty modern. Or maybe postmodern, which ever is the hip one right now.

I wear v-necks. I have an iPhone. I use Twitter like it’s my JOB. Occasionally, I’ll even listen to a band who plays old-timey music in a new-timey way, with rolled up jeans and banjos and sneaky accordions, which actually makes it cutting edge music.

But, sometimes, I’m shocked at how old-fashioned I really am at heart.

I was reminded of this recently when a pastor I saw “jump started” a prayer. Not familiar with the phrase? That’s good, because I think I just invented it.

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Last Monday morning, I had a meeting scheduled at 11:30AM to discuss the title of my new book with Dave Ramsey. He’s sold millions of books and written a couple of New York Time’s Bestsellers. I was eager for his advice.

The weekend before, I practiced my ten-minute, “Here is why this title is the best one,” monologue like it was a speech. I sat down in our spare bedroom, because I knew I’d be sitting in the meeting and recreated the meeting as closely as possible. (I am wicked weird.)

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Someone recently got in trouble in the middle of a prayer circle and it was kind of my fault.

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“Maybe it’s a demon.” My wife says and I can’t tell if she’s joking at first.

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I’m not sure if the phrase, “you’re welcome,” is officially in the Bible, but it should be because,

You’re welcome.

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Today is a day of prayer on Stuff Christians Like.

Today, starting at 7AM eastern time, people from around the world will be praying about the requests people left in the comments on this post and any new prayer requests that come in.

People from all over have volunteered to cover the hours of the day and the comments with prayer.

Let’s pray. Here is a link to hundreds of prayer requests. If you have a prayer request you would like someone to pray for, please post a comment on today’s post.

The list of people who will be praying is after the jump. (We’ll pretend daylight savings time is not happening until after we’re finished at 7AM Sunday morning.)

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If you ever come over to my house for dinner and I ask you to grab something for me from the basement, please know that’s just code for “the closet under the stairs.”

We don’t have a basement, so we call the wicked small space under the stairs our basement. And we call our living room the “office” because that’s where the computer is. And we call our dining room the “playroom” because that’s where the princess dresses are hanging up should you so desire to get your Snow White on.

Our house is a mish mash of rooms pulling double if not triple duty, but I realized recently there’s one thing we don’t have – a prayer closet.

A prayer closet is a small space you go in to pray and focus on the Lord without distractions. I assume that spiritual titans like Billy Graham have prayer closets that have vacuum sealed doors and upon entering them they are completely separated from everything else in the world except God.

I don’t currently have that. In fact, the best way to make sure my daughters play some sort of techno drum & bass solo on a door is to close it while trying to use the bathroom. They have “Whoa, someone is alone” radar and will tap tap tap tap tap tap the night away if you try to get some alone time. That’s why if you want to eat a piece of candy you have to hide yourself in the pantry, and do it in secret. So unless I find a way to tunnel to the magma encrusted core of the earth and establish my prayer closet there, it’s probably not going to happen for me at home.

That leaves me 4 prayer closet alternatives:

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What? Who is calling me this early? Which one of my friends is up right now and not engaged in a quiet time, like I am? Sweaty heathen. And they’re calling me?

I’m not answering the phone. I’m in the middle of a quiet time. Come on, stop calling. I see your number, I know your name, we’ll talk later. I’m in the middle of a quiet, reflective moment with God. I need a prayer closet. No forget that, I need a prayer bunker. Possibly somewhere under ground. Maybe a prayer lair that spits on fog from one of the fog machines they use in youth groups. Fine, I’ll pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m just doing my quiet time right now. What are you doing?”

Pause.

“Oh you’re driving to work? Cool, well it’s been good talking to you. I’m going to get back to this quiet time. I’ll call you later. No, seriously, I want to hear about the divorce you’re going through but I’ll give you a call after I’m done reading God’s word. Yeah, I gotta go” …

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I used to be a mailman.

My wife disagrees. She doesn’t feel one summer of delivering mail qualifies me to claim “I used to be a mailman,” but she’s never enlisted in the United States Postal Service. She’s never driven a jeep with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. She’s never worn the badge of the red, white and blue and doesn’t understand that once you join, you are forever a letter carrier. To this day, I’m required by law to egg the UPS guy when he brings Amazon packages to our house. What can brown do for me? Brown can get egged. I’ve already said too much.

But if I were forced to rewrite the sentence, “I used to be a mailman,” I would rewrite it to say:

“I used to be a horrible mailman.”

That sentence is now accurate, because I was one of the worst mailman in the history of the postal service. My greatest fault, of the many I brought to that summer, was my speed. I was really slow at delivering mail, so much so that at the end of the day, I had to sprint and jump off of porches to try to get back to the post office with all the outgoing mail.

But my slowness wasn’t always my fault. One day, I was late because of a prayer sneak attack and that is a day firmly lodged in my memory.

I was walking up a driveway on a hot July day in Framingham, Massachusetts when I saw the homeowner watering his yard with a house. I had never met him before, (unlike that family who let me use their bathroom after I made the rookie mailman mistake of eating a steak and cheese sandwich from a vending machine at the post office. Who could have known that thing would be bad? And how awkward is it for the mailman to come in and use your bathroom?) I handed him the mail, we talked about the weather and then he laid his sweaty hand on my sweaty shoulder and started praying.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, prayer sneak attack. I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to pray too? Was he the opener and I was the closer? Should I bow my head? Were my mailman skills so horrible he felt compelled to pray? Should I close my eyes?

I was so surprised that I just stood there while this stranger prayed on me and then I walked back to the jeep and continued to be a completely mediocre mailman.

What’s the protocol in a situation like that? Could we come to some sort of bylaws or something? It’s going to happen again. And when it does, here are the three things I hope my prayer sneak attacker knows:

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“Hi, it’s nice to meet you, lady who is making me late to church.”

I didn’t say that a few weeks ago when my wife stopped my speed walk to the sanctuary so that I could meet one of her friends after dropping off our kids in Sunday School. That probably would have been rude to proclaim, but that was what I was thinking. Standing there watching people stream in the open doors and fill up the seats, I could feel myself getting anxious.

“We’re going to be late. We’re going to be late. Oh the agony, so close but yet so far away. Any second now they’re going to close those doors and we’ll have to sneak in along the baseboards like some sort of rat or hamster scurrying for birdseed that the Acuffs may have left in the garage without thinking that a rodent the size of a small cat would find it, eventually get stuck on a glue trap, scream so loud you could hear it in the house and then get murdered by a grandmother across the street because you were at work and couldn’t come home.” (Whoa, that just got personal.)

And although we weren’t late that day, I know it’s going to happen. We’re going to show up behind schedule and need to sneak into church at some point, so I went ahead and wrote myself a guide on the best way to come into church late. Without further ado:

7 things you need to know about sneaking into church late …

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