Daily Effective Prayer

I noticed something about my prayers recently that I didn't particularly like. There was a lot of me in them. My decisions. My family. Things I needed wisdom about. People I wanted God to help because whatever they were dealing with affected me too. Even some of my prayers for other people, if I'm being completely fair, eventually wandered back toward how their situation was making my life harder. I don't think there's anything wrong with bringing our own needs to God. Jesus told us to ask. Scripture is full of people doing exactly that, sometimes very urgently. But I started wondering when I'd last spent any real time praying for somebody who couldn't do anything for me. That question hung around. A few days later I was waiting for someone outside a medical building. People kept coming through the sliding doors, some moving quickly, some slowly, and one older man came out carrying one of those clear plastic hospital bags with his belongings inside. He sat on a ...

I wish I could say that when I sit down to pray, everything else politely leaves my mind. It doesn't. A few mornings ago I started praying and, maybe two minutes in, remembered that I needed to order a replacement part for something. I have no idea why my brain decided prayer was the ideal moment to bring this up. I hadn't thought about the part since the previous afternoon. I tried to ignore it. Then I started wondering whether I'd written down the model number. Back to prayer. Thirty seconds later I remembered somebody I needed to call. This is not unusual. For years I felt mildly guilty about it because I had an idea of what serious prayer was supposed to look like. You sit somewhere quiet, concentrate on God, pray with great faith, and presumably don't spend part of the time wondering whether you remembered to put the garbage bins out. My actual prayer life has rarely been that cooperative. There are good mornings, of course. Sometimes I open my Bible and one passag...

A few years ago I was standing in the middle of a Home Depot when my phone rang. I had a sheet of plywood measurements folded in my pocket, sawdust still stuck to one sleeve, and I was already irritated because the thing I’d planned to finish that afternoon was taking twice as long as it should have. The person calling gave me news about someone I cared about, and within about thirty seconds the plywood didn’t matter anymore. I remember hanging up and continuing to stand there. People were walking around me pushing those oversized carts that never seem to steer straight, somebody nearby dropped something metal, and an employee asked whether I needed help finding anything. I said no, although at that particular moment I probably needed help finding several things that weren't sold in the building. I wanted to pray . Nothing came. That bothered me because prayer is a significant part of my life. I’ve prayed publicly, privately, with people, for people, when things were going wonderfu...

I was standing in a hardware store holding two nearly identical boxes of screws when I caught myself doing something ridiculous. I had been there longer than I care to admit, reading tiny numbers on the labels, putting one box back, picking up another, trying to remember the thickness of a piece of wood sitting twenty minutes away at home. Somewhere in the middle of this deeply unimportant crisis, I quietly said, “God, help me pick the right ones.” Then I felt silly. Not convicted. Silly. There are wars happening. Families are burying people they love. Somebody is sitting beside a hospital bed right now listening to machines beep. People are praying about marriages that are barely holding together, children who have walked away from God, rent they cannot cover, test results they’re frightened to open. And here I was asking God about screws. I bought the wrong ones, by the way. That detail still makes me laugh because it ruins the story if I’m trying to turn it into a neat testimony abo...

A while back I was helping a neighbor clear out his late father’s workshop. We spent most of an afternoon opening drawers that probably hadn’t been touched in years. There were bent nails in old coffee cans, fishing line wrapped around screwdrivers, half-used tubes of glue that had turned solid, and one drawer filled almost entirely with keys that apparently opened nothing anyone could identify. At some point we found an old radio underneath a pile of extension cords. He plugged it in mostly as a joke, and somehow it still worked, although only one station came through and even that sounded rough. We left it playing while we kept sorting things. I thought about that workshop later for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Maybe because so much of it had been waiting there untouched. Objects someone once used every week had become things nobody understood. I remember driving home and suddenly thinking about a prayer I’d been carrying for so long that I couldn’t honestly remember when I star...

I was standing beside a crowded baggage carousel watching the same battered blue suitcase pass for the fourth time. Mine still hadn’t appeared, the airport announcements were muffled beyond recognition, and I had an important decision sitting in my mind that had absolutely nothing to do with luggage. I’d been turning it over for days, asking God for direction, and by that point I was prepared to call almost any feeling of relief an answer. That was the part I hadn’t admitted yet. One option felt difficult, awkward, and likely to create several uncomfortable conversations. The other option offered an immediate escape from all of that. Naturally, I wanted the easier choice to be God’s will, and I had become remarkably skilled at finding spiritual language to support what I already preferred. Standing there while strangers reached across one another for nearly identical black suitcases, I finally prayed a different prayer. “The Lord, help me recognize the difference between Your peace and...