Opposite the ‘Kop end’ (whatever that means) of Liverpool Football Club is a god-bothering centre. It’s a church, but one of those modern evangelical ones so looks more like a local village hall. And outside of it they’ve erected a blackboard and placed pieces of chalk there for people to use in order to write their prayers.
Yep, it’s an official prayer board. You write the name of a person you want them to pray for, they copy it down, go inside and pray for them. When they’ve done all the praying they come back outside and clean the blackboard.
A simple idea. Being Christians, I’m guessing they feel obliged to pray for any name they find.
Well, today, I finally got told off and banned from writing on the Prayer Board, by an angry lady who startled me with a, “Just you stop that. Stop that now! You’re old enough to know better!”. Over recent weeks, almost every day, I’ve deliberately stopped and gotten out of the car to write things on their prayer board.
I started with ‘Margaret Thatcher’, a name which Scousers equate to ‘Lucifer’, and to date have asked for prayers for ‘David Cameron’ ‘Rupert Murdoch’ ‘Theresa May’ ‘Boris Johnson’ ‘Donald Trump’ ‘Kelvin MacKenzie’ alongside ‘the lost souls on the Titanic’ ‘southerners’ and many more odd phrases like ‘those who do rather than those who don’t’.
I’m assuming they have to pray for my choices because it would be unChristian to ignore them. They’d be trembling with guilt at selectively not praying for the people I’ve asked them to pray for.
This whole praying thing is bizarre. When you pray ‘for’ somebody surely you are messing with the pre-ordained order of things? You are challenging ‘god’ and his decisions. That’s got to piss him off, surely? If I was ‘god’ I’d just smite the annoying whining twats, and give kudos to those of my creation that just gotten on with their lives. And, if loads of praying twats were mentioning one particular name, I’d probably do something to the person they are praying about just to upset them and teach them a lesson about hassling me.
Anyway, god will be less bothered because of me and my rabid suggestions on the Prayer Board, now. I’m scared of the angry lady who might smite me!
England's England 