This week I was offered the opportunity to say the closing prayer at a community Good Friday service.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Knowing that I sometimes verbally stumble around in my public prayers, I decided to go into the evening prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n
I first Googled “Good Friday prayers” and scrolled through several pages looking for the perfect prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n
I got bupkis.<\/p>\n\n\n
Then a 2023-inspired thought popped into my head: Let’s see what ChatGPT might come up with.<\/p>\n\n\n
Honestly, the prayer written by AI was better than a lot of the others I was reading on line, so I emailed myself the text intending to simply read it off my phone … while all heads were bowed.<\/p>\n\n\n
But as the service approached, I felt weirder and weirder about reading a prayer written by AI. I went back and forth in my mind. Was it really any different than reading one written by some other human?<\/p>\n\n\n
Not really.<\/p>\n\n\n
Then it hit me: THAT was the problem – reading <\/b><\/i>a prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n
I know there’s a time and place where that might be appropriate, but in my opinion it most often turns the prayer into a ceremony <\/i>when it ought to be … communion with God.<\/p>\n\n\n
Or at least an attempt <\/b><\/i>at communion with Him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I decided I would rather offer the genuineness of an impromptu prayer even if the price is a few awkward pauses and some verbal gaffes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
(I ended up basing my prayer on a passage of Scripture which I had open in front of me.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I was offered the opportunity to say the closing prayer at a community Good Friday service.\u00a0 Knowing that I sometimes verbally stumble around in my public prayers, I decided to go into the evening prepared. I first Googled “Good Friday prayers” and scrolled through several pages looking for the perfect prayer. I got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2177,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions\/2177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}