When you sit down to pray, does your mind wander to all the tasks you have in front of you?
We can struggle with keeping our attention towards God throughout the day. It can seem like we have turned on the autopilot to our spiritual lives. The day fills up with chores, meetings, tasks, and appointments. Our thoughts range from identifying solutions to problems to the hamster wheel of worry.
I think for many of us we desire prayer to rise to the forefront of our lives, but it can seem like an afterthought. Problematically, our picture of prayer looks like the paintings of a person sitting down with their hands folded and head down.
Frank Laubach served as a missionary in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Listen to the words of this letter from April 22, 1930:
“This morning I started out fresh, by finding a rich experience of God in the sunrise. Then I tried to let Him control my hands while I was shaving and dressing and eating breakfast. Now I am trying to let God control my hands as I pound the typewriter keys. There is nothing that we can do excepting to throw ourselves open to God. There is, there must be, so much more in Him than He can give us. It ought to be tremendously helpful to be able to acquire the habit of reaching out strongly after God’s thoughts, and to ask, “God, what have you to put into my mind now if only I can be large enough?” That waiting, eager attitude ought to give God the chance He needs.”
— Excerpt from Devotional Classics
What if prayer has become too formal in our lives? Like Laubach, we could begin to find God in our “shaving” moments like these:
The commute to and from work.
Taking a walk around the neighborhood block.
The quiet moments of catch or playing games with our kids.
Finishing cooking dinner and cleaning the dishes.
Maybe our struggle with prayer has less to do with our formal time in the morning or night, but opening our awareness to God’s presence throughout the day. Deeper than that, the Gospel reminds us that Jesus desires us to know and experience Him because He’s with us.
What moment in your day will invite the awareness of God through prayer?
Photo by Patrick Coddou