Lord, Teach Us to Pray
Finding our Center in God
Learning to pray has been an arduous lifelong process for me. I have always struggled with being still. You can ask my momma in heaven, and she will remind you of my behavior growing up and how often she wanted to whack me upside the head for my constant fidgeting and flitting.
Prayer, which means being with God, requires a willingness to “be still and know” (Psalm 46:10). God intentionally marks our lives with a Sabbath (Lord’s Day) rest each week to remind us that our lives are meant for more than activity, particularly for relationship with God, self, and neighbor, and that takes intentionality, time, and the willingness to be still before another.
My mom was much better at praying than I was. I have her red Amplified Bible (it was a thing in the 70s!) on a shelf in my home. Since her death, I’ve returned to it occasionally and looked at all the slips of paper she left inside its pages—page after page of names of people that she would pray for every morning. As a kid, I didn’t know about her secret getaway time with God, but I figured it out as I aged! Every morning very early (around 6:00 am-ish), she would take her bible and her Upper Room devotional (it was a Methodist thing) and spend time with God in prayer. Usually, alongside her Bible, was her coffee with cream and sugar and a piece of toast or, on special occasions, her coffee cake. (Those who know about this know about this!)
Most slips of paper in my mom’s Bible had my name on them, sometimes highlighted and bolded. My brother Neil’s name was on her lists, but he was far more angelic than I was! Seeing our names is an anchoring reality for me. I know that we stand on the shoulders of people who pray and, thus, take their relationship with God seriously.
One aspect of my prayer life that has developed over the years is making peace with the gift of routine. My spastic nature always seems to think routine is a straitjacket limiting creativity and freedom rather than its opposite, an aid for creativity and freedom. There is a rich Christian tradition of a way to understand and practice a way of routined and/or repeated prayer, often called contemplative prayer. Praying contemplatively is praying deep, not rushing, and going slow. The emphasis is on being with God, not talking to Him, but listening to God, and letting Him and His Word set the agenda, not you. Like everything good, contemplative prayer can be perverted into something akin to Buddhist mindlessness or “being at one with the god within” mumbo-jumbo. For a Christian, prayer is fully mindful and rooted in reality and facts, particularly in God’s self-revelation of His character and will for our lives, in the words of Scripture.
The most known in the Church’s history of a repeated and contemplative form of Christian prayer is the Jesus Prayer, where one uses words echoing the words of the tax collector to Jesus from Luke 18:13 while praying, “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The Jesus Prayer is most commonly associated with Christian piety in the Eastern Church. (All Christian denominations emanate from the West - Roman Catholic or the East - Orthodoxy.)
A way to pray contemplatively is by praying repeatedly any Scripture text, like the Jesus Prayer. Another contemplative way is by repeating helpful biblically-based truths. I have a repeated prayer that helps me with my personality peculiarities. It goes like this, “Lord Jesus, your presence is my center, and thus (or because of that) I live today with contentment and joy.” Sometimes, I change out the words contentment or joy if there’s something else rising in importance, like the need for wisdom, confidence, or peace. Contemplative and repeating prayers (or even written prayers, like the Lord’s Prayer or a prayer penned by a saint) can be challenging for some who are used to envisioning prayer as primarily what you do or what you say to God rather than being with and listening to God.
Learning to be still and knowing that God is God is an invitation from His heart to all of us. I pray that you will take God up on His offer.