Friday Five: Waitin' and Prayin'

Here's the RevGalBlogPals' Friday Five for this week:

Part of the Ascension Day Scripture from Acts 11 contains this promise from Jesus;

"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Then he was taken from their sight into the clouds, two angels appeared and instructed the probably bewildered disciples to go back to Jerusalem, where they began to wait and to pray for the gift Jesus had promised.

Prayer is a joy to some of us, and a chore to others, waiting likewise can be filled with anticipation or anxiety....

So how do you wait and pray?

1. How do you pray best, alone or with others?
I value communal worship as well as private worship...so my answer is "yes."

2. Do you enjoy the discipline of waiting, is it a time of anticipation or anxiety?
I'm a terrible waiter.

3. Is there a time when you have waited upon God for a specific promise?
It wasn't a promise...but I recall, as a college undergrad, earnestly waiting for God to visit me with a Pauline knock-me-off-my-horse moment of vocational clarity that would lead me to a career. To which God said, in God's Deus absconditus way, What am I -- a Ouija board? Go figure it out yourself. Twenty-some years later, I'm still figuring.

4. Do you prefer stillness or action?
I am cursed with the Lutheran-church-basement-lady need to be useful. I have a hard time being still either physically or mentally.

5. If ( and this is slightly tongue in cheek) you were promised one gift spiritual or otherwise what would you choose to recieve?
To borrow a phrase from my Pentecostal friends, I'd want deliverance from the Demon of Procrastination. Out! Out! Get thee behind me! Out!