Ready, Aim, Fire: 5 helps to kill prayer-distractions
Our Father who is in heaven…I wonder if God’s throne has padding on it? Why would it? But what would a throne be without some upholstery, oh wait… Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name… I wonder where the word ‘hallowed’ comes from? Oh, yeah I remember it’s got to do with holiness, as in All Hallow’s eve, or Halloween. Can Christians celebrate Halloween? Oh wait, …may your kingdom come… I wonder if Jesus meant a literal kingdom or a spiritual one. Boy, the premill/amill debate is a mind-bender. It’s like a Rubic’s cube. Where is my old Rubic’s cube anyway…oh wait…
Do your prayers ever perambulate aimlessly like a drunk jogger? Mine neither. I am focussed and intentional at every point in my prayers. Just like you.
But imagine your immature friend asks you for counsel on how to overcome distractions in prayer?
Here are five helps I use distracted neophytes use to stay focussed…
1. Use Categories to lay tracks for your train of thought
If your prayers tend to derail and charge off uninhibited, you can use a prayer journal or index card to map out the direction of your prayer time.
Categories you may want to cover are:
- Praise for attributes of God
- Thanks for blessings in your life
- Intercession for the spiritual/physical needs of others (you may want to sub-divide this into family, friends, government, church, pastor, etc).
- Petition for your own needs and desires
2. Seal the door with specific items in each category
Distractions are like determined burglars who are trying to break into our thoughts. When we leave our minds ajar, we supply them with a gap in our defense.
A bullet-point list of names or keywords of people/items you want to pray about welds shut the seams through which distractions infiltrate.
3. Fight from the high ground by selecting a suitable location
Praying while driving, if done well, will cause an accident. If you aren’t crashing, then you aren’t praying right. As with a general plotting an ambush, selecting the right location can leverage your strength in the skirmish. Yes, Jonah prayed in the belly of a fish. We can pray anywhere. But for our regular times of prayer, why opt for a spot fraught with obstacles to effectiveness?
Choose the most quiet, isolated, and uninterruptible that is available to you. Susanna Wesley famously, and resourcefully, used an apron over her head as a signal to her teeming hordes of offspring that this was her quiet(er) time.
For us this will involve turning off our cellphones. You’d do that for an important interview or business meeting, right?
4. Cage uninvited thoughts in a to-do list
Distractions are like determined burglars who are trying to break into our thoughts. When we leave our minds ajar, we supply them with a gap in our defense.
Why is it that a hitherto unscheduled appointment has remained shelved contentedly in our subconscious for days, but will demand immediate attention the moment we sit down to pray? These aggressive recollections need to be handled with firmness.
I cage them by reserving a blank block on the page of my prayer journal. In this block I scrawl any important thought that barges in uninvited. Once I have written it down– so that I can transcribe it later into my day planner– the urgency tends to quiet down and wait in its cage for the remainder of my prayer.
5. Pen your prayers
If the above four strategies don’t work as well as you’d hoped at leashing your maundering prayers, you can try the coup de grace of distraction-defying methods: write out your whole prayer.
I have found that writing a prayer out in a journal hones focus like nothing else.
All tangential temptations flee the room, and this habit also provides me with a reference I can come back to in order to monitor spiritual growth/decline, and answered prayers.
What other weapons do you use to assassinate unwanted distractions?
