GODFREY: Well, there's always Luther's advice. When he was asked, "What should I do because I'm
so prayerless? What should I do that I don't want to pray? What should I do that I don't
pray?" And he said, "Take yourself in hand and say, 'Down on your knees, you lazy bum. Pray!'"
And to a certain extent, that's true. The only way to become prayerful is to
pray and to pray that the Lord will make you prayerful. It's a gift of His, and we have to
pursue it. And I think Calvin said something similar, but in a slightly more refined way,
"If you don't feel like praying, pray that the Lord will make you feel like praying."
DEYOUNG: I would, you know, want to know is it a sense of prayerlessness or is it
prayerlessness? So, I'm going to take the question to mean the person has an accurate
sense in that they're struggling to pray, and that certainly is part of the counsel
that we may need. I would also want people to understand very practically, sometimes we
have a truncated view of what prayer is like, and that may perhaps be owing to our own evangelical
tradition and perhaps even because of the heritage of the Awakenings, all that's helpful with it.
But we can get in our minds that to pray means I'm by myself, and I'm
getting up in the morning and now I got to spend a half-hour talking to God. Well most of us, how
many of us can get up and do any -- communicate anything meaningfully when we first wake up for
a half-hour? I mean, you can't do anything. So, we think that we should just be able to, "Okay,
get up, you're out of bed, you're not tired and go pray." Well, I can't do that. It takes not
only work to pray, but it takes work to prepare to pray. So, there's all sorts of ways you can do and
lists and helpful devices, but part of realizing is we have equated our prayer time sometimes with
spontaneous, extemporaneous private devotions. Get some brothers or sisters around to pray and
even if you can't think of what to say, you can, as Paul said, you know, "Amen" to their prayers.
You have a hymnal. Though every one of those, some of them are prayers,
they all can be used as prayers. You can read the Psalms. One of the greatest prayer warriors
I know who is one of these guys who does get up and pray four hours a day, he said,
"Mainly what I do is, I'm memorizing the Psalms and I'm praying them to the Lord
and I'm going through the Psalms." Use The Valley of Vision, use prayer books, use even
the Book of Common Prayer, sneak it in to your Presbyterian church, just use it privately.
You know, get a really old version of it before it got goofy. There's lots of things that we can do.
When Jesus went out and, you know, was praying, we tend to think He was just praying like we were,
but He was probably going through a set of Psalms, Psalter hymns that He knew by heart,
different prayers that Jews were instructed in, and so there's many ways to kind of jumpstart
your prayer. And let me just give you one very practical that's been helpful for me, walk.
It's harder to fall asleep when you're walking.
You go out and you walk ten minutes and you've got ten minutes to come back, long wandering prayer.
Read through Psalm 55, for example, sometime. I should look if it's David … the psalmist,
just to cover my bases, is praying and, you know, sometimes he's talking to God second person,
sometimes he's talking about himself, sometimes he's just talking about God in the third person.
It's a freewheeling conversation in the presence of God. And most important about prayer perhaps
is where it ends up and sometimes on the way to end up in a good place,
those Psalms take some circuitous routes and we may too in our long,
wandering prayers. So, get up, walk around, have a hymnal, try something different.