The Predicaments of Praying from Privilege

Some of you may know Mark Weathers from his comments here. I wanted to point you to his series starting in the Austin Examiner: The Predicaments of Praying from Privilege. After a quote by Thomas Merton, Mark starts the series off with a couple of difficult questions for many American Christians:

In the grand scheme of history, I have never confronted the magnitude of difficulty that befell the vast majority our human ancestors. Pestilence, famine, tribal warfare, drought, systematic persecution, discrimination, religious violence and hunger are alien concepts to me. I confront them only as newspaper headlines. If I even look around the globe today, the global nexus of journalism opens my western mind to distant moral epidemics that I cannot even contemplate. Oppression of women, the poor and racial minorities around the world is simply staggering.

I set up this rather general backdrop because therein lies my spiritual conundrum. How do I pray before God, taking into account the rather minuscule weight of my problems?

... how do we speak our experience of crisis to God, and still remember that our pressures are minor when weighed on the scales of human history?