Agape for a stranger

I finished a rough draft of Chapter 4 of my book. For this chapter I bought River Jordan’s “Praying for Strangers” and enjoyed quoting from it.

This 4th Step in the 7-step agape prayer practice is about holding in prayer a neutral person who is either merely an acquaintance or even a stranger. The purpose of this step is to practice letting the flow of agape help you want the well-being of this stranger equally as strongly as you did for the persons you chose for the other steps. In order to accomplish this, a person needs to visualize participating with this person in the spiritual flowing of agape until finding the spiritual concern that this chosen person will find personal well-being and deep sense of peace.

For this chapter, I did a verse-by-verse careful and detailed study of 1 Cor. 13 (especially verses 4-8). Here is a quote from that study: “agape was implanted in each of our hearts for the purpose of making it possible for us to wake up to the trust that God is gently and persistently accepting us and helping us find spiritual power to help us in life. And it’s a good thing that patience is at the heart of agape, because most of us usually make it harder for ourselves to let agape flow in our lives. That’s also why nobody should get discouraged when there are a lot of missteps, start-overs, and stops, and restarts that come with the agape prayer practice. That just seems to be the way it happens when trying to do this in our confusing, overly pressurized modern world.”

When I searched for what caused the negative emotions mentioned in those verses, I said, “So first, agape overcomes any neediness that a person may let build up from the many fears we let grab ahold of us. It provides us with a sense of fulfillment that cuts through any tendency to desire to try building up ourselves by putting down someone else. Of course, Paul never heard of the concept of self-esteem, but when we read those verses after having heard about the modern emotional need to be strengthened in our sense of self-esteem, we can see how connecting with the power of agape can give us a basis more eternally sound than we could ever find by inventing ego-identities constructed from the experiences we have in early childhood and the fears that keep plaguing us from infancy. There is also an underlying meaning running through those verses that agape opens a person’s heart-sense to supply the basis for working to achieve what is best for the human community. That sense of common humanity is meant in the Greek expression ‘to me ta heats’ of verse 5, so that when we translate it as applying to agape, we see it means: ‘agape works against seeking selfish advantage over the common good.’”

Then I got such enjoyment from reading River Jordan’s “Praying for Stranger” that I used several quotes from it.