One of the trickiest but most rewarding kinds of prayer to master is unceasing prayer. One form of this kind of prayer integrates an awareness of God’s presence and communion with Him into the humdrum stuff of daily life until the various tasks of the day become acts of prayer. Finding God in the clatter of an industrial kitchen, in the chaos of a classroom, in traffic, on Zoom, demands a process that is tricky, but rewarding. The first step towards this is mechanical habit. Just as you wouldn’t run a marathon without training purposefully first, you don’t just dive into trying to be with God 24/7. Take an action you do repeatedly throughout the day and start using it as a trigger for a short prayer. It could be drinking water, it could be washing your hands, it could be loading Zoom, or any one of the repeated tasks that make up your day. To make it more concrete, tie your short prayer to the action itself. When you drink water, “Thank You for being the Water of Life.” When you wash your hands, “Create in me a clean heart.” When you load up Zoom, “Make me an instrument of Your peace.” The point isn’t to do long, chatty prayers, but to repeat a simple prayer, integrated into everyday life, until it becomes second nature. The next step is to let it seep into your subconscious. Through enough repetition of the mechanical habit, you will start to change. If you pray for wisdom every time you sit down to work, you will start to notice more intentionality in what you do. If you pray for God’s peace before you start driving, you might notice yourself being kinder to others in traffic. Repetition and habit change people, and there is an incredible thing that happens when the regimented and mechanical starts to become a part of you. As a wild example, one of my first churches had a karate class as a part of its overall evangelistic strategy. (It actually worked; I’ve never seen a Muslim family willingly visit any other Adventist church.) For my own health and fitness, I attended this class and learned the various kung fu forms taught there. These forms are predetermined sequences of movements designed to teach a vocabulary of motion. After about a year and a half in this class, I dreamed that I was practicing my form, and woke up to realize that I had actually been doing it in my sleep. Apply the same force of repetition to prayer, and you get a much more spiritually enriching (and less potentially dangerous) result. I used to be better at this sort of thing than I am now, and the result was a collection of the most beautiful dreams of my life--dreams about Jesus’s all-encompassing love, dreams about the Second Coming, and glimpses of my guardian angel. These dreams, with their vivid imagery, are still a source of inspiration to me today, even though I had them over a decade ago. The third step is to let it sink into your heart. All of our content-rich prayers tend to be chatty requests, chatty praise, all very wordy and verbal expressions of our thoughts. There’s nothing wrong with that, but after a certain point, thought is meant to shape emotion. For example, the practice of praying for someone who annoys you every time you see them will start out feeling forced, become more subconscious, and ultimately change the way you feel about that person. The practice of praying for wisdom starts out as an intellectual exercise about obtaining it in everyday matters, but transforms into gratitude and joy over the God of all wisdom. (For a great example of this, check out the first six chapters of the book of Daniel.) The mind may very well be the most important governor of action, but over time, it will affect the heart and emotions. The final and most elusive step is total union with God. Few people actually achieve this, and those who do rarely attain it permanently--after all, God is God and we are sinful human beings. This is where we enter into a state of constant communion with God, receiving from Him what we need all day long and letting prayer permeate every fiber of our being. I have actually met a few people who clearly have this kind of connection with God, and they amaze me. They aren’t sinless, but their connection with God is so close that they catch the sin early and bring it to Him before it gets out of hand. They have a tangible peace that radiates from them. Their spirituality tends not to be flashy or attention-grabbing--rather, it’s such an integrated part of their everyday life that it quietly reveals itself in the small things. God is in the details, but not in the striving to master them--that’s a form of legalism. Rather, a constant communion with God creates a natural flow of decisions that subconsciously affects these small things of life and aligns them with His great purpose. Weirdly enough, mastery of the last step isn’t necessarily tied to age. I can think of both young and old in every stage of this process. The advantage of youth is less mental clutter in the way of pursuing this, while the advantage of age is greater life experience to grasp its importance. In both cases, practice is required, and no steps can be skipped. The mechanical, awkward practice of a repeated prayer while washing the dishes may not have the beauty and elegance of total communion with God, but you cannot get to the latter without passing through the former. Just as a pianist starts out as a child playing “Hot Cross Buns” long before they can tackle the soaring strains of Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, we must start with the simple things before we can move into the deep, beautiful, and complicated steps beyond.
1 Comment
Betty B.
10/9/2020 11:05:31 am
So love this and appreciate encouragement to do it and on deeper level as you grow.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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