Praying Without Ceasing

A year or so ago I caught the flu. Now I have often thought that being confined to bed for a couple days with nothing to do would be like heaven on earth--but of course it wasn’t. It was awful. And it happened at a time in my life that I was longing to have more time to pray. Yet when I was handed that time on a silver platter, I couldn’t pray--I was just too sick. My mind was mush. All I could say was, “God please help me feel better.”

Now I have no doubt God heard my simple get well prayer (see the previous two posts on Praying Simple Prayers) but I was somewhat sobered by this inability to get my mind in gear when there were lots of things I wanted to pray about and time on my hands to do it. When I was back on my feet I decided to create a simple outline of things I knew I always wanted to pray about whenever I had the opportunity. I took one of those packs of 3x5 cards that are spiral bound together and began to write short sentences or phrases—one per card—that would help guide my prayers. The first card says, “God, thank you for loving me, a sinner.” The second says, “Please make the periphery and all the day’s distractions drop away. Let me see only you.” Some cards are deliberately open-ended—“Lord, thank you for the situation I find myself in today”—so they will launch me into praying specifically about what’s going on right now. Some cards just have one word—just enough to remind me of the issue so that I can remember to pray about it.

These cards have helped me to pray many times. I am not sure they are the best way to pray when you have a few minutes to be alone with God in undistracted peace and quiet, but they have been a great way to expand my prayer life into times that I would never have been able to pray before. Now I can actually pray while killing time in the orthodontist’s waiting room or sitting in traffic. I just grab my little deck of cards and it reminds me of the things I most want to talk to God about. They focus me on the task (or, rather, privilege) of praying when I used to be worrying about what to cook for dinner, fretting about the time I was wasting, getting irritated about the doctor overbooking appointments, etc. For me, they have been another step toward “praying without ceasing.”

The 3x5 cards only cost a couple bucks. It’s probably worth the investment to see if this is a trick that will work for you.

"...be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray." 1 Peter 4:7