Saturday is our 15th annual Prayer & Praise Breakfast at church — an important conclusion to our Week of Prayer (with daily prayer meetings in homes). After we eat, we sing, I open the Word of God, then all share testimonies from the week before we spend one more session together in prayer.

The testimonies are not all “answers to prayers” but often are about how the week challenged (or changed) the person, and how thankful they are. And this is good! Our aim on Saturday morning is to raise praises and give thanks to the Lord!

In my sharing (on Romans 15:13), I plan to warn against cynicism and how it can undermine prayer. One of the key weapons against cynicism is thankfulness:

“Nothing undercuts cynicism more than a spirit of thankfulness. You begin to realize that your whole life is a gift. Thankfulness isn’t a matter of forcing yourself to see the happy side of life. That would be returning to näive optimism. Thanking God restores the natural order of our dependence upon God. It enables us to see life as it really is.”

— Paul Miller in his book, A PRAYING LIFE, page 89

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