I find praying difficult.
Combine an activist personality (I want to achieve something!) with a wandering mind and a sinful amount of self sufficiency and you get not much prayer.
I've been reading C.S. Lewis' book on prayer - Letter to Malcolm. I've read it before. There's some weird stuff in it (praying wordlessly?!) but it's interesting and helpful.
I've decided to write myself a set of prayers to use. I'll mostly write them in a form for corporate use (we, us, our etc) but I'll alter them a bit to use myself.
I'm going to try to write a couple of prayers of confession, a prayer for our world, a form of prayer for friends, a prayer for my family, a prayer for myself, and a prayer for my church.
For the next few weeks I'm going to make these the prayers that I say. I'm just going to recite them (or some of them) each day. I'll see if it helps me with concentration and making sure that I get around to praying the things I should pray.
Anyone else tried this?
Haven't tried actually writing out set prayers, but have adopted Kent and Barbara Hughes template for a prayer diary/routine which helps with making sure we pray about many areas of life and ministry, both close to home and wider world which we weren't very good at.
ReplyDeleteIt's friday night and have not much else to do for once, so i thought i'd chime in.
ReplyDeleteI'm (possibly) ADD. I need to write out my prayers. longhand. often in pencil to slow me down.
I don't really like recommending books... but Paul Miller's book "A Praying Life" was super helpful. He's worth a look in.