Dave's five-year-old son Mikey stood up at McDonald's and prayed loudly for the food, turning heads in the restaurant. Dave uses the moment to challenge listeners about public prayer and cultural discomfort with blessing meals in everyday spaces.
Chapters
This is Dave on the Edge. One morning when it was my job to get the kids ready for school and to prepare breakfast, I got them dressed and I piled them into the car and drove them to McDonald's. That's how Dad does breakfast. And so we sat down at McDonald's and I'd torn up all of their pancakes. I'm not sure if you did that when you were little, but they liked them all torn up in little pieces and then they would dip them in the syrup. They called it the dipping sauce. And as everything was ready and all there on the plate and on their plates and everything, all 3 kids, I whispered quietly to them, Okay guys, who wants to say prayer? And Mikey, my littlest one, he wasn't sitting properly, he had his feet underneath him, and he jumped straight up into the air and he yelled, "I will pray!" And the McDonald's was full of people and everyone stopped and they just looked at Mikey. If his mom had been there, she would have grabbed him, pulled him down and said, "You be quiet, young man." But I saw a sermon illustration in the making. And so I just said, "Thank you, son, go ahead." And standing there he said, Dear Jesus, thank you for our food. Please bless it so that we can be strong. Amen. And he sat down. And it was interesting to listen around the McDonald's. The little comments, "Oh, that was cute," and people snickering, having a laugh, and little conversations started back up again. And I thought to myself, I wonder how many times an entire McDonald's has had their food prayed for. But Mikey had just blessed everybody's food there. You know, the prayer is an amazing thing, and often we undervalue it. But Mikey, a 5-year-old at the time, understood that you pray before your meal. He wasn't shy to pray. He wasn't nervous about standing up and saying, "Hey, let's have a prayer together." I think sometimes when you meet someone and you have a conversation with them and you realize that the right way to finish would be with a prayer, what's the harm in doing that? Why not just say, "I've really valued this conversation with you today. Could we have a prayer?" Mikey challenged me, challenged me to think about prayer more often. To involve it in my daily life and to be bold with it in the face of people who may not believe. This has been Dave on the Edge. Where do you stand?
