It’s Random

I have always been a man of prayer. For as long as I can remember, prayer has been a big part of my life. That’s not to say I don’t have a lot to learn in regards to prayer, but I pray constantly. About a week ago I read a post over at ChristianPF about the author’s prayer challenge to himself. For every waking hour of every day for seven days, he would pray for 5 minutes. The idea intrigued me. My comfort has always been praying when I felt the need to pray. Praying on demand (being called on to pray in a group for example) is tough for me, mostly stemming from being afraid of public speaking.  A friend made the comment about how awsome it would be if every Christian in the world would do this. I felt led to do this myself and  set my phone to beep on the hour every hour. For almost a week I struggled through praying on a schedule. I continued my prayer life as it was before this challenge also, so this wasn’t the only praying I was doing.

First I tried making a list of things to pray for each hour. That  worked out pretty well but I only did that for one day. After that I tried a few different things. For one day, I decided I would pray for the people nearest me when it came time, and another day I simply prayed for what I felt led to pray for.

In the end, I failed miserably with this. I began to resent the alarm going off and interrupting whatever I was doing at the time. I wanted to focus on God, but for some reason I was unable to do so completely. When it came time to pray I didn’t change anything about my surroundings, but stopped exactly where I was (well not when I was driving) and prayed. About a week or so after I first read about this challenge, I also got a pretty bad cold and that knocked me off all sorts of commitments and schedules. I still haven’t quite recovered, either from the cold or being thrown off schedule.

I read the followup article over at ChristianPF and looked back over my experience. I think a change of setting is important to success at this. Take a walk, grab a cup of coffee, or just lock yourself in the bathroom. I realize, even though I was beginning to resent the alarm and interruption, I was much closer to God during this period. Looking back I can see a drastic difference between those few days that week and the days since. Some of that can be attributed to the hectic pace of this week and general drabness of the week I was really sick, but mostly I believe it was being in continual prayer.

At this point, I do plan to try this again, but I’m going to wait a while first. I’m starting scripture memorization tomorrow and adding too many things at once is a very bad idea. We’ll see how it goes.

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