Excerpt from Chapter 1: Praying With Other People's Words

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter (Praying With Other People's Words), which discusses many of us already come to this kind of prayer with a bias for or against it.] If you were to walk through my church’s building about five minutes after the beginning of our worship services, on one end of the hallway you would hear a huge pipe organ booming as that part of our congregation sings a hymn that is likely to be three to five hundred years old or older. Other parts of their worship service will likely include things like the people up front being in robes, praying by saying aloud one of the responsive readings from one of the Psalms in the back of the hymnal, or banners hanging in the sanctuary that have to be certain colors at certain times of the year.

If you would normally prefer to worship at this end of the hallway, my hope is that this chapter will add depth of meaning to some things you likely do in worship already, and help you to see ways that we could become more prayerful people by carrying those practices into our the other parts of our days and weeks.

However, the worship service taking place at the other end of the hallway is very different. If you were to walk toward it, you would hear music equally booming, but this time coming from a drum set, guitars, and electric keyboards as that part of our congregation sings a song that is likely to be six months to a year old or newer. Other parts of their worship service will likely include thing like the people up front being in jeans, every prayer said being made up on the spot by the person saying it, and various multimedia images being projected on the majority of the wall space visible throughout the service.

If you would be more likely to find yourself in the drums and multimedia end of the hallway, thank you for at least reading to the fourth page of this chapter before skipping ahead in the book. Hang in there with me, because my experience is that you are likely to find at least as much depth of meaning in this way of praying as your friends down the hallway.

I mention this because I am well aware of the potential that some of you may already be turned off to this chapter just because of its title. If that is you, it’s okay that you feel that way, and there is likely some good reason that you do. I am more of a newcomer to intentionally using this kind of prayer than the others that we will explore in this book, so I think I understand your hesitations. Yet I include this way of praying, and I include it first, for some important reasons. First, I have found this way of praying to be very life-giving to me personally, and as I have taught this material to others in classes and retreats, this way of praying is the one where people most often describe a light bulb coming on inside of them. One woman stopped me after we opened a retreat by teaching on the topics in this chapter and said, “Even if we didn’t do anything else after that, I’m glad I came.”

(I wanted to stop the retreat right then, realizing the mistake I had made in setting people up for disappointment in the remainder of the things I had to say, but it all ended up okay.)

So, if you are one for whom the title, “Praying With Other People’s Words” fails to light a light bulb or anything else within you, remember the advice of Albert Haase’s spiritual director that we considered in the Introduction, “Find the way of praying that works for you,” the way of praying that helps you to be prayerful, and do so by trial and error. If praying with others’ words isn’t something that you think makes you tick, I am only asking you to hang in there with us through the end of the book and experiment with how each of these ways might help you become a more prayerful person.

Do Prayer and Exercise Have Anything in Common?

A really good comment from my friend Alayna (a.k.a. Paul) got me thinking about some connections between prayer and exercise. Like any metaphor, it eventually breaks down. I've never wanted to throw up after prayer, nor been hardly able to walk the next day from praying more than I should have when I wasn't used to praying very much. But I think there are some good parallels:

Whether we realize it or not, some good how-to guidance really matters. When we aren't praying, or aren't exercising, we can think of both of these activities as things we know we should be doing, and already know how to do, but we just aren't doing them. When we aren't praying or exercising, the how-to seems too elementary for us to bother to investigate: to exercise, we could just go out our front doors and start jogging. To start praying we might say something like, "Dear God, please help me..., please help them...., please help us... Amen." While neither of those approaches are the worst in the world, neither are they the best. That approach to exercise rarely makes an unfit person healthy, and that approach to prayer rarely makes an ordinary life prayerful.

On the other hand, once we begin to attempt exercise or prayer, we find that some good how-to guidance is highly valuable. For example, we find how helpful it is to have a plan, or to learn from those who have already taken the steps we're attempting to take. In exercise, the guidance helps us to avoid injuries and to stick with it when we don't feel like exercising. In prayer, the guidance helps us to shape our our prayers in ways we might not think of on our own and to stick with it when we don't feel like praying.

It's easy to avoid doing them by convincing ourselves we always do them. I have a good friend for whom I have enormous respect who used to wear a pedometer, and we'll call him Russell. (The point of wearing of a pedometer is to count how many steps you take during a day in order to quantify your level of activity, or lack thereof, in a normal day.) While it was a good thing that Russell wore that pedometer, I don't think it accomplished its intended result. Rather than attaching it to his hip, as the instructions say to do, Russell discovered that the pedometer also fit nicely onto the side of his shoe. In addition to looking a bit more stylish, this also allowed Russ to earn quite a bit of extra credit on the pedometer. All day long, as he sat at his desk (or drinking Dr. Pepper with me), he would habitually shake his foot... all the while getting credit from the pedometer for living an active lifestyle.

When we think of our main way of praying as "praying all day long," we're like Russell sitting at his desk, drinking a soda, shaking his foot and getting credit for exercising all day long. We absolutely need specific, dedicated times of exercise to be healthy, and we also need specific, dedicated times of prayer to be prayerful. When we have those specific times, we begin to find that their effects spill over into the rest of our days, and then the real experience of praying all day long comes into view for us. The times of exercise give us more strength or energy in another part of the day when we wouldn't have had them otherwise. The times of prayer help us to be aware of what God is up to in our world when we would normally have been completely oblivious.

This is the flip side of what I wrote about in A Life That Makes Prayer Come Naturally. The key in that post to prayer coming naturally for Mr. Means from the moment he awoke each day was all of the time he spent intentionally praying throughout his life. If we try to only develop a sense of constant prayer without building it on dedicated times of prayer, we may as well sit at a desk, shake our foot, and see how healthy it makes us.

It's tempting to stop short of letting them take their effect on us. Several years ago, I bought a weight set. (We disassembled it when we moved six years ago, and it's never been put back together since then.) I used it two times in one week, and suddenly I thought of myself as a serious athlete. The truth was that I was still practically as unfit as I had been before getting the weight set. The only real difference was that I was an unfit person who had lifted weights twice in a week. I may have been headed toward a more fit life, but I surely wasn't there yet, regardless of how I was thinking of myself.

It's the same with prayer. If we have two consecutive days with dedicated times for prayer, many of us think we'll soon be nominated for canonization as saints, even if we're not Catholic. However, the likely truth is that we're probably still living largely prayerless lives, though we're hopefully on the road toward living more prayerfully.

The point of exercise and the point of prayer is not what happens during the moments when we exercise or pray. Rather, the point is the (healthy or prayerful) life that those moments lead us to develop over the course of time.

Searching for Simple and Reliable

[I'm working on the Introduction to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction discussing the need for guidance that is both simple and reliable, though that can often be difficult to find.]

In all of our lives, we inevitably look for guidance from others, whether personally or through books and other media. Sometimes the guidance we get is simple but perhaps not as reliable as we need it to be. For example, it turns out that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” isn’t as true as people would have us believe. I went through a stretch of my life where I ate apples almost every day, usually dipped in mounds of peanut butter, or perhaps together with oatmeal and cinnamon sugar under a pile of ice cream, or (my favorite) in a dessert my wife makes together with gobs of cool whip and pieces of Snickers bars. I followed the advice to have an apple a day pretty well during those years, but for some reason, while eating those apples in these ways, it was in that same period of time that I went from having recently been a college athlete to hardly being able to even think about running down and back on a basketball court. The doctors visits ensued, despite all the apples I consumed. The advice regarding apples was simple, but not as reliable as goobers like me need it to be.

On the other hand, we’ve all probably also had experience with advice that is reliable, but not simple enough. If I start having car problems, I can walk into my local auto parts store and locate the thick printed repair guide for my car’s make and model. I will have no idea how to do what it says. That does not mean its guidance is unreliable, but it just is not simple enough for me.

Thankfully, though, there is another kind of advice. The best advice we receive in life, the kind that sticks with us for decades and that we make sure to pass on to our kids and grandkids, is that which is both simple and reliable. Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps have been helpful to me and millions of others for this reason. Or, I’ll never forget sitting with my college pastor as I was preparing to graduate and had the sudden realization that I would no longer be allowed to live in the dorm, eat in the cafeteria and attend classes, but would soon have to find another way to live. As the variety of options seemed rather overwhelming to me, his simple and reliable advice was, “Just make sure you’re in God’s will today and you won’t miss being in it tomorrow.” It was simple and reliable; I’ve never forgotten it and continue to work at shaping my life around it.

From my experience, the need for simple and reliable guidance when we seek to learn to pray is just as needed as in any other part of our lives. Guidance that is described by one end or the other of the simple/reliable spectrum abounds, but guidance that is described by both ends can seem hard to find. So, after having spent quite a bit of time seeking guidance on prayer from sources all across that spectrum, my goal in this book is to pass on the some of the most reliable parts of it in simple ways. So, we will take a look at three time-proven ways that ordinary lives have become prayerful:

  • Praying With Other People’s Words
  • Praying Without Words
  • Praying With Your Own Words

Live Prayerfully Sample Chapter: Praying Without Words

Below is a sample chapter from the book I'm working on [and the latest version of the title is], Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. This is the chapter on praying without words. Please feel free to leave comments, and if you like it, pass it along to others. And here's a revised elevator pitch, with credits to my wife and to Robert Pelfrey:

Live Prayerfully is a book on prayer that shares time-proven guidance in fresh and relatable ways, including how we can pray with other people’s words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying.

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An Elevator Pitch for the Book

If you and I were acquaintances running into each other on an elevator and you asked me how work was going, (if it was a slow elevator and I knew we both had to go all the way to the top) I might tell you that I'm trying to write a book. This was never the case in the past, even though I've been working on it for a couple of years now. Almost no one beyond my wife knew about it before I made it public here on the blog a few days ago in an effort to try to get unstuck on the project. Even my Mom was surprised to find out about it, just as I was surprised to realize I'd never mentioned it to her. I don't intend to be this way, but apparently keeping things from people is one of my greatest natural abilities- even when I don't know that I'm doing it. So, if during that elevator conversation when I mentioned to you that I'm trying to write a book, you did the polite thing and said, "Oh really, what's it about?" I would try to respond like this:

I'm calling it Live Prayerfully: Three Ways Ordinary Lives Have Become Prayerful Throughout the Centuries. It's for people who sincerely want to grow in their attempts to pray, but, like most of us, wouldn't normally access the rich guidance passed down through history about how to build prayerful lives. Often this guidance is in old language, or academic terms, or perhaps very abstract, so I am trying to pass some of the core pieces of that guidance along in fresh and relatable ways by writing about how we can pray with other people's words, pray without words, and pray with our own words, as well as guiding readers into participating in each of those ways of praying. My experience has been that putting those kinds of prayer together allows them to build off of one another and helps the times that we have set aside for prayer to spill over into the rest of our lives, making us more prayerful people.

So now, let's say that you're not just an acquaintance on the elevator, but a really good friend whom I've said this to... what's your reaction?

PS: My wife says that this description may put some of acquaintances to sleep by the time we reach the top floor on that elevator ride. If you agree, your comment can be something like "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz".