Back in the day before smart phones and messaging we had a wonderful example of the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints. It was called the prayer chain and the way it worked was simple. Someone got sick or went to the hospital and the family or the pastor would call the first person on the prayer chain list and they would call the second and so on. Prayer would them arise for the person and the sick person knew that the whole church not only was thinking about them but was actively praying for them. Today we just have a list of people and we hit a button and everyone on the list gets the message.
Now we all played a game in school where the teacher would whisper something in the ear of a student and that student would pass the message along until the last student got the message. That student then reported what they had heard. The teacher then wrote on the board what he had said. There were times when the message was so garbled and messed up that it was nothing close to what was said at the beginning. It helped us see the danger of second hand information or the difficulty of clear communication across multiple platforms.
There was a wonderful exchange at the so called impeachment inquiry where an ambassador was read an addendum to what another ambassador had said after he had sounded like a member of a high school clique of mean girls listing all the awful stuff that they had heard. Amber told me that Meaghan said to her that Tiffany told Crystal ….. you get the drift.
Jim Jordan said these words to the ambassador after he told the committee that the issue had become clear to him after a series of overheard conversations, that went like this, “Ambassador Taylor says that he recalls that I told Mr. Morrison that I convinced Mr. Yermak in connection with Vice President Pence’s meeting to Warsaw”. He went on, “and so we have six people having four conversations in one sentence and you are telling me this is where you got the clear understanding,” Jordan said he had seen church prayer chains that made more sense and were clearer than that.
I want to thank Jordan for a kind of back handed complement to prayer chains. Although they sometime got garbled we all knew that the ultimate audience was God who knew who the sick were and knew what they needed because he knows all things including the secrets of our hearts. That is something for ambassadors and politicians and everyone to think about long and hard.
