The Practice of Prayer, part 2
Many years ago, when I was a student at a tertiary institute, a fellow student in the InterVasity Fellowship group asked me how she could possibly pray without ceasing, as instructed in I Thessalonians 5:16-18 when she had so much happening in her life. She felt that she was letting God down by not keeping God in the front of her mind all the time. I asked her if she thought about her parents all the time, and the obvious answer was “No”. I suggested to her that we don’t need to be thinking of God all the time to maintain our relationship with God, any more than we have to be thinking about our parents to maintain our relationship with them.
I’ve thought about that discussion several times over the years, and keep coming back to my awareness at that time, that praying without ceasing is not the formation of words, audible or inaudible, as much as it is maintaining a heart towards God in all that we do.
Praying is so easily narrowed down to words spoken to God, but I believe that prayer is the focus of our heart. Prayer is the relationship that we have with God. We pray by making God the centre of all that we do. Anything else runs the risk of being performance-based, or following rules.
Prayer includes:
- Taking time to engage with the natural world
- Being amazed by the stars
- Pausing to enjoy the beauty of a bee on a flower
- Feeling the sand between your toes on a beach
- Being present to the joys and pains of those with whom we interact
- Developing empathy
- Acknowledging and honoring the Imago Dei in others
- Greeting and treating others as though we are meeting with God
- Acknowledging God’s presence with us regardless of whether or not we feel it
- Recognising that God is with us in our highs and lows.
- Reminding ourselves that God is equally present whether we feel it or not
- Deliberately disengaging from busyness in order to become more aware of our surroundings
- Putting the phone on mute, or flight mode for a while
- Disabling all but the necessary notifications (we don’t need to know about every like that comes in our social media feed)
- Any activity that moves us away from the centre of our own thinking and awareness
- Practicing mindfulness (a topic for another day)
Or we can use our words…
However we pray, let’s do it with sincerity, honesty, openness and from a place of of relationship, not as an obligation or a rule.
Faith should be lived out in practice
- Even The Elect Will Be Deceived - 28 March 2026
- In Christ Daily – Day 3 - 2 November 2025
- In Christ Daily – Day 2 - 2 November 2025