I Was a Failure at Prayer
Ever since I became a Christian, I've worried about praying. Should I pray to God the Father? To Jesus? To the Comforter God sent to advocate for us after Jesus left our world? Should I favor unmistakably sacred topics—gratitude, praise, others' salvation—over my daily worries and complaints? And how, precisely, does one go about conversing with someone not physically present?
Expert advice on prayer abounds. At the Christian university where I teach, chapel speakers promote everything from praying directly from Scripture to "just being quiet and listening." Orthodox speakers recommend the "Jesus Prayer": "Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me, a sinner." Other speakers say prayer is simply a conversation with God, and I think, Simply?! Just a regular old conversation with someone I can't see, hear, or touch, and whose voice is so tricky to sort from others', especially from the voices of my own hopes and fears?
My measly prayers typically amount to internal gasps of Help! in a crisis or middle-of-the-night anxieties I call "pray-worrying." Occasionally I add a perfunctory—and usually long overdue—remembrance of someone else's problems. Or let out a "Wow!" in recognition of some dazzling evidence of God's creativity. Sometimes, though, I go whole days without conversing with God at all.
I'm especially ungifted in the area of public prayer. I covet others' ability not only to remember long lists of others' needs but to reformulate them into communiqués that don't sound, as mine do, wacky or false.
And whether I'm praying publicly or privately, I seem incapable of praying for very long. After a minute or two, I get distracted. In bed, I fall asleep. At church, I find myself gazing over the bowed heads around me, trying to remember if I turned off my daughters' hair straightener. Although I'd like to follow the apostle Paul's advice to pray continually, I can't do it.
Once, on a plane trip, I sat next to an elderly woman wearing a funny little diaphanous bonnet. When I asked about it, she called it her "prayer hat" and said she wore it because the Bible says to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17, NRSV) and that women should cover their heads while praying (1 Corinthians 11:5-6). She was a sweet, earnest woman, and I wondered if, somewhere beneath our conversation, she was praying for me even then. I hoped so. Later I discovered she was. We'd exchanged addresses, and she sent me occasional letters over the next years saying she was still praying for me.
I wish I could pray as she did: for a stranger, years after a chance meeting, continually, and with childlike confidence in even the oddest passages of Scripture.
I can't seem to maintain a regular "quiet time with God," as friends call their prayers. Some of them have devotions every morning, following a reading schedule—the Bible in a year's time or a devotional anthology—that keeps them on track. One friend has a devotional teatime, filling an extra cup to visualize God's presence. My husband reads a daily Bible chapter over breakfast. I try to follow his example but soon find myself mechanically grading those last three papers or reading one of the magazines accruing on the breakfast table. I am, in short, a failure at prayer.
Originally published in: Today's Christian Woman, 2009, May/June, Vol. 31, Issue 3, Page 24
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Denise
Your article was so insightful. Thanks for all the help. I sometimes finds myself going back to when I was in Catholic School doing all the prayers we did then. I am teaching my Sunday and Wednesday Children Class that Prayer is just talking to God about anything. It is so simple, we just make it complicated. God Bless you.
pamela
i thought i was the only one like thank you so very much.
Carol
Thank you Patty so much, I too thought I was the only one who felt this way!
jessane
i thought i was the only one who felt that way.thank you.
angelica
This was a great story, I was really encouraged. Thanks!
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