"How do you pray?"

​The Holidays are upon us! Croatians don’t celebrate Halloween or Thanksgiving (of course), so the shops are full of Christmas décor and sweets. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t buy a few Christmas decorations already. Although Croatians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, we are excited to be able to celebrate with other ex-pats- and if there’s pie, all will be right in the world. As for Christmas, we have good and bad news. The bad news is that we are still waiting for our VISAs so we can’t have our belongings shipped from the USA yet. We were hoping to have our crate for Christmas so we could have our traditional decorations (and other belongings). The good news is that we will have family visiting for Christmas! My grandparents couldn’t help but take advantage of the pause in our class schedule, so they are breaking in their walking shoes and getting ready for a sweet time together.  

Instead of Halloween, we were celebrating Svi Sveti last week. In English- All Saint’s Day. The days surrounding this “blagdan” (Croatian for ‘religious holiday’) led Jeremiah and I to think about prayer and the way Croatians think about prayer. I didn’t know much about All Saint’s Day before spending my first one in Croatia, but I learned a lot about what my friends here think of the day. They honor the family members that have died by going to and decorating their graves, which also brings honor to the living family by showing off their material ‘blessings’. We visited the biggest and most famous cemetery in Croatia (Mirogoj, pictures at the end) the day before Svi Sveti, and along with grave decorating, we saw a lot of people praying. My friend explained to me that families will use this time to pray that their dead loved ones might go to heaven. For many, they believe that regular, good people go to purgatory when they die, and depending on how ‘good’ they were, can go to heaven after a period has passed. The belief is that if they pray for the family members, maybe God will go ahead and let them into heaven. 

A few days earlier, I was having coffee with a friend while our daughters played together. She had a lot of questions about my faith and one that I was not expecting. She asked me how I pray. I hadn’t thought much about the possibility of having to explain this to her because I know that she grew up going to a Catholic church. I knew that Catholic people pray. What I did not know, though, was when I told her I would pray about her new job or her daughter’s health, this was a foreign concept to her. 

A final conversation after the coffee with my friend and the trip to the cemetery helped me finally realize that I had a different understanding of prayer than those around me. During class one day, I was commenting on how hard it is to study language full time while parenting little ones. A phrase I have repeated often in recent years is “Jesus and coffee”. The girl I was talking to laughed and said “Yes, I’m sure you need a lot of forgiveness”. That really wasn’t what I had in mind. In regard to parenting, most often I pray for energy, stamina, wisdom, grace, and forgiveness at times. But it occurred to me that the people here view prayer as a way to ask for forgiveness and mercy, and that’s all. In their minds, the work of Jesus on the cross is not enough. It’s up to them to make sure they deserve God’s grace. Not only that, but they seem to think that God is not relational. He doesn’t care to know them personally and intimately, and a direct personal relationship is reserved for the special few, the saints. The main concern is not knowing God and abiding with him, but merely escaping his wrath and spending less time in purgatory. 

I think of the passage in Philippians 4. “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (vs. 4-7). The Lord is near, and he wants to hear from us! Please pray with us for the people in Croatia that they would come to know who Jesus is in an intimate and personal way. Pray that they would make him the Lord of their lives and experience the peace that he offers.