Thoughts Along The Journey

Have you ever taken an inventory of your prayer life?  I don’t mean an inventory of requests made and answers given.  I’m talking about an accounting of what you say when you pray.

Just doing a quick ‘check’ of the past few days, I came to the following conclusions:

• I did a fair job of varying praise, thanksgiving, and prayer requests (little prideful thinking there).
• Many times, I found myself praying: “And I want to ask you to …”
• Basically I talked and God listened.

Listening, as I wrote yesterday, is just plain hard.  It’s hard because listening is not about us, but about others and understanding what is on their mind.  Maybe I could rephrase that in regards to prayer by saying that listening is not about us, but about God and understanding what is on His mind.

At the recent Europe leadership meetings, the main speaker made us to take some significant time to just ‘listen’ to God in prayer.  ‘Significant’ for most of us means about 2-3 minutes.  What I took from that time was how hard it is to listen to God.  In other words, how hard it is to shut off our continual prayer request default mode and ‘hear’ Him speaking to us through His Word and through the time spent listening to Him.

It’s not something I am good at (maybe you feel the same way). It’s not something I can learn quickly.  It’s something I must practice.

I’ve picked up a couple of books to stir my thinking on the subject: Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Donald S. Whitney; The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg, and The Attentive Life, Leighton Ford.

Perhaps you might have others to suggest.  However, the point is for me, for you, to practice listening to God.

Filed under: Community, Listening, Prayer, Silence & Solitude, Uncategorized |