A Patchwork of Borrowed thoughts: Incorporating Prayer into Life’s Daily Rhythms

Sojourn’s Prayer Ministry leader Ben Gantt has written “40 Days Of Prayer,” a prayer guide which we’re handing out today at Sojourn Gathered and this Wednesday morning at 6:30, for the first of five Wednesday morning prayer meetings in the auditorium of The 930.  We want, more than ever, to be a community of prayer.  Our Wednesday prayer meetings will last until 7:30 a.m. so if your work schedule allows, we hope you will join us in praying for God’s blessing, protection and wisdom on the life of this community.  These forty days of prayer will take us up to the launch of our new Sojourn campus in St. Matthews.

And now, a member of the prayer team who wishes to remain anonymous has posted thoughts on prayer that we feel are valuable for each of us individually and as a family:

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Prayer has always posed a challenge to me in the sense that it I have bought deeply into wrong thinking about it being formal, distant and difficult…perpetually at arms’ length, so to speak.  Prayer, to me, tends to be associated with the two hours I didn’t have available locked in a closet, fighting distracted thoughts and plowing ahead unsuccessfully in an attempt to reach God and/or fulfill a religious quota.  Because of this perception, Paul’s directive in I Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing”  and others like it have always confounded if not completely frustrated me, even though Jesus clearly establishes through His example a life completely dependent on prayer, including the numerous occasions we see Him slip away from whatever was going on, in order to be with His Father.

Recently, I have run across some very well-spoken Biblical truth on the topic that has helped begin to blast away at the mountain of false perceptions that has crippled my prayer life.  It has begun to make prayer more accessible, more natural, and “prayer without ceasing” a more attainable condition in walk with Him.  I have very little to add to these thoughts; they stand on their own.

I first read this from Richard Foster’s book ,Celebration of Discipline:

“…it is not prayer in addition to work, but prayer simultaneous with work.  We precede, enfold, and follow all our work with prayer.  Prayer and action become wedded.  ‘There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once.  On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs.  But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”

So, in a sense, Foster is really prescribing prayer as a 24/7 state of submitted and receptive and submitted awe as much as or moreso than a staged, segregated activity.  I particularly connected to the conscious actions of preceding, enfolding, and following everything I do with prayer so that my doing and my praying become connected…..and I strive to align my mind and my heart to a place where I truly am, as Foster so adeptly says, be “receptive to divine breathings” within every moment of my day.

The May 26^th entry of Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest builds on this mentality of prayer as the most natural thing we can do:

The correct concept is to think of prayer as the breath in our lungs and the blood from our hearts. Our blood flows and our breathing continues “without ceasing”; we are not even conscious of it, but it never stops. And we are not always conscious of Jesus keeping us in perfect oneness with God, but if we are obeying Him, He always is. Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer. “Pray without ceasing . . .”- maintain the childlike habit of offering up prayer in your heart to God all the time.

Put another way, I am praying that, in the same sense breathing that is a natural and immediate response to the body’s need for oxygen, calling out to my Father will become an instinctive first reaction to every situation that presents itself throughout the day….that He will reform my thinking so that my communion with Him consists not merely in those dedicated times of solitude, but in a round-the-clock abiding that depends on vital interaction with Him they way the lungs crave air.

O taste and see that the LORD is good;

How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

Psalm 34.8