Why do you do it?

This week I was listening to a pastor in a church we visited while on holiday and he was urging his congregation to attend the upcoming prayer meeting, and he suggested that it had not been previously well attended. Just a few weeks ago I heard the same exhortation from our church, and as I began to ponder it, I realised, prayer meetings in general are not the most well attended meetings in church across the board. 

It doesn't matter which denomination, or how charismatic the church is, there just isn't the attendance.  I began to ask myself why that might be.  One of my questions was 'why do we have prayer meetings?' or 'What is their purpose?'.

I am not going to answer those questions now, but what it did make me think is that, as Christians we do a lot of things without thinking, whether at church, or in our personal walk with the Lord, but do we understand why we do them.

When we repeat the same actions or words over and over (and no, this is not just true of churches that have a written liturgy) they can loose their meaning and their significance.

I remember a story of a woman who used to chop her Sunday joint of beef in half before roasting.   One day her daughter asked her "Mum, why do you do that?".
The mother thought for a moment and said "Well that's the way my mum taught me. I've always done it like this." 
"But why?" the daughter asked.
"I don't know,"said mum "We'll ask Nanny."
On the next visit to grandma they asked the question. "Oh that's because when I was younger my oven was too small to fit the joint in whole so I had to cut it to get it all in at once!"

You see the daughter just kept up the tradition without knowing why.  We can be like that as believers, doing things because that's what we've always done, but sometimes we need to think about what we do, work out why we do it, and decided whether to keep on doing it (or doing it that way) and change if wee need to. 

Sometimes it means doing nothing differently, sometimes it means reminding ourself why we do something, and sometimes we need to let go of the past (the way we've always done it) and press on to the future.