A Toolbelt for Prayer
Do You Pray?
Lots of things are hard for a new mom, but there was one thing I didn’t know would be hard — prayer. As a young mom, my prayer life tanked. I went for days that became weeks and months without any intentional, regular prayer. I didn’t plan to be a woman who didn’t pray much, but I also didn’t plan to pray. The result was drift. I drifted into a life with little intentional prayer, and little evident fruitfulness. During those years, no one asked me, “Do you pray, Andrea?” Not “Do you believe in prayer?” or “Do you pray when you’re stressed?” but “Do you actually pray?” One day a faithful Christian mom casually talked about her daily prayer life and I realized that was something I didn’t have — a daily prayer life.
Stop the Drift
Author and teacher Dallas Willard says, “We will never drift into holiness.” We do nothing to deserve Christ’s saving call; we are saved by grace alone. It is a gift of God and not our own doing (Eph. 2:8). But God’s saving call is a call to action, not a call to passivity, to drift. In my experience, one of the main reasons we Christian women find our prayer life threadbare is because we don’t plan to pray. We think it will just happen, somehow, without action and effort, and so we drift. The good news is that drift is easy to stop. Just do something—anything—and you will begin making progress again.
Failed Fluency
Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and you are willing to give more than either we desire or deserve.
(Book of Common Prayer, 1552)
Prayer is something we do, not just as Christians, but as humans. Euguene Peterson says that prayer is “our most human action…we are most ourselves when we pray.” For many, this is nothing more than “random exclamations scattered over a lifetime,” but “others of us, not content to be our true selves only occasionally, hunt for a way to cultivate fluency” (As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 60).
God’s ear is always open. He is ready and willing to act in response to our prayers. God is not the problem, we are. So what keeps us from fluency in our prayers? We know the usual suspects:
Not enough time
Too much to pray for
Too many distractions
I don’t know what to say
I get bored
It feels like a duty, not a delight
I just say the same things
I don’t feel like praying
Sometimes all we need to get past these obstacles is help to take the first step. Several pastors and staff from Cities Church shared how they organize and plan their daily prayers. If you feel stuck in your prayer life, maybe one of these tools will help stop the drift and move you steadily toward more fluent and faithful prayer!
Tool #1: Make a Plan
concentric circle prayer
One way to organize intercessory prayer (praying for specific needs for ourselves and others) uses concentric circles, beginning with the center (yourself and those closest to you), and working outward. One of our pastors uses the categories above, and shares what he prays within those categories. This pattern is helpful when we have so many things we want to pray for, we don’t even know where to start. The suggestions for what to pray within each category help us get beyond common, but non-specific, requests (like help bless, heal, be with).
Lists
Make a simple table and fill in specific people/things you will pray for each day. Start with just one or two, if that is all you can manage. You can add to it as you increase capacity. There is space to write a few notes next to each request - maybe a verse to pray or a specific need. If you don’t pray each day, no problem. If you miss this Monday, you know what to pray the next time you pray on a Monday. You can use more than one table — maybe one for your family and one for church family.
Here’s the list I used to pray for our Cities Women, built out over two years (with a few details covered up).
cards
Write individual names (family, friends, missionaries), requests, or categories (city, church, school, nation, global missions) on cards, and try to pray for at least three each day. After praying for a card, move it to the back of the pile, and pray for the next three the next time you pray. One pastor’s family saves their Christmas cards and prays for a few families/friends each evening.
Tool #2: The Power of the Pencil
If your challenge is staying focused during prayer, consider three ways to stay engaged:
Write your prayers
Get a prayer journal and write your prayer out each day. Writing keeps you from distraction, and helps you think more about what you really want to say. But let’s be honest, writing takes time, so here’s another option…Shorthand your prayers
One pastor writes his prayers by writing just the first letter of every word he is praying. In this shorthand form, the Lord’s Prayer looks like this: OFwiih,hbyn.Ykcywbdoeaiiih. Gutdodbafuodawfod. Lunitbdufe, fyitkatpatgfae, amen. Although you can’t go back and read shorthand prayers later, that is not the point. The point is to minimize distraction and help you really pray.Type your prayers
It’s okay to type your prayers! One pastor types his prayers in a Google doc. Typing is faster, he can go back and see what he what he prayed for three years ago, and it keeps his mind engaged in prayer.
Tool #3: The Word of God
Sometimes we struggle with the content of our prayers. We ask questions like:
What are the kind of things I should be praying?
How can I get rid of unhelpful repetition?
How can I use better words?
Praying with our Bible open deepens the content of our prayers and helps us to pray inline with God’s own heart.
Praying the Bible
Don Whitney’s book, Praying the Bible, offers a simple and easy way to use the Psalms (and other passages) to guide the content of our prayers. Praying following the language of the Psalms enriches our prayers and eliminates boredom.
Scripture Cards
Write Scripture passages, such as Paul’s prayers from the New Testament, onto index cards. Use these prayers as the guide for what you will be praying for yourself and others that day. When we pray these Scripture prayers, we move past the bland, “bless so-and-so,” and instead build real content into our prayers, “Fill so-and-so with the knowledge of your will. Give her spiritual wisdom and understanding, so she can walk in your ways today.”
This prayer journal, published by Crossway Books, offers an excellent way to organize prayers over a long period of time. There are pages for temporary, specific names/requests written on sticky-notes, and pages to write out Scriptures, hymns, and prayers (original, or borrowed from saints of old). These long-term pages are used to guide how you pray for the short-term requests.
Be Thou My Vision, by Jonathan Gibson (Crossway Books), provides a daily liturgy to walk you through adoration, confession, and intercession, along with other elements, like creeds, catechisms, and daily Bible reading. If your prayer life needs a boost, this is an excellent resource to fuel your prayer and lead you to deeper daily worship. The many prayers of past saints will give you new vocabulary for your own prayers.
Just Pray
There are really only two ways to fail in our prayer life: never start, or quit. Don’t let discouragement over past failure keep you from praying today. Isn’t that just what Satan would love? One author writes in Screwtape fashion, imagining what one demon might say to another in order to keep a woman from prayer:
"Just see that she doesn’t allow structure into her prayer life, structure that will put her through the early years of not yet really liking to pray, and not yet feeling like she’s “good” at it. Never let her ask the obvious question of how and when she will pray. In short, just see she doesn’t actually do any praying.”
(My Dear Hemlock, Tilly Dillehay)
Don’t try to do every method suggested here, but don’t do nothing. Take a step, stop the drift, and increase your fluency in prayer, starting today. Remember, God is more ready to hear than we are to pray!