Having said that, I’ve found (and am still finding) that the best way to maintain a life of prayer is to fill my mind with truth about how God sees me and feels about me. I need to hear His words. To borrow from Meg’s post, when I consecrate myself to take in His words about how He sees me, I set myself up to encounter Him in the place of prayer.

For me, this all starts in Psalm 45:2…”Grace is poured upon Your lips.” The words that He speaks are dripping with grace, with love, with mercy…they’re words that my soul loves to hear. They don’t condemn me, they lift me up. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I usually prefer to hang out with people who, I’m pretty sure, I like me. And by the same token, if I know someone really doesn’t like me, I’m usually going to do everything in my power to avoid being alone with them. The same is true of my heart before God: if I feel shame or condemnation, or if I believe the lies that I’m not performing up to snuff, I avoid prayer. I don’t want to set my heart before someone (God, no less) if I’m sure they’re disappointed in me. But when my heart is convinced of the truth that He is in love with me, as much now as He has ever been and ever will be, prayer becomes a little more enjoyable. Just a little. So the more my heart hears those words from the One who is drenched with grace, the more I want to stick around in that place with Him (prayer).

So let’s consecrate ourselves unto encounter; let’s commit to getting the Word into our heads and our hearts, especially the passages that reveal His thoughts and feelings about us. Hear words of grace, love and kindness, and let the understanding of His thoughts and feelings about us sink in. Realize that He actually likes us and likes to be around us. That’s where prayer starts to become enjoyable, which is the best way I know to sustain prayer in a busy lifestyle.

It can be so easy for me to think that a life of prayer only looks like “quiet time”, or “contemplative prayer”…extended periods of prayer in solitude.  While I know that there is no substitute for those sessions of long and loving meditation, I’m also learning (slowly but surely) that prayer can occur all day, every day.  It is when I learn to converse with God through the little moments each day that I find myself living a life that more closely resembles the prayer-centered life that I long to live.

Someone once told me that life can be broken down into 30-second segments.  It is in those little snapshots of life that I find it’s easy to build momentum moving towards God, or from Him.  Those 30-second windows are perfect opportunities to offer up little phrases of love and thanksgiving…these are the very prayers that make Jesus say “…you have ravished my heart with one look of your eyes” (SOS 4:9).  I also find that these are the moments when satan loves to tempt and distract.  It’s so easy to “check out” in these moments.  But I have also found that my heart makes it through the day with a much bigger “skip in it’s step” when I take these moments to love and adore the One who loved me more thoroughly than any earthly love.

I encourage you, in those slow moments today between work and family and phone calls and whatever else you do, take a breath and gaze with the eyes of your heart on the One whose eyes are forever fixed on you.  Give Him a little “I love You”, and I know that you’ll start to feel that weak little prayer overcome His heart.  And this type of prayer, in these little 30-second windows, is the doorway to praying without ceasing.

Then I left the greenhouse.  I moved home to Canada, got married, and locked in to a 9-5 job.  I suddenly had a job that didn’t make me pray, I had a lot less free time to myself than I had when I was single, and I was no longer surrounded by a few hundred people who were pressing in hard.  This has formed the context of my journey into a life of prayer in the 9-5 world.  The big question is: “how do I pick myself up, shake off the dust, and press in again day after day?  How do I keep moving forward with a life of prayer, now that I’m out of the greenhouse?”

I learned a paradigm-shifting truth over my first weekend in “the greenhouse”, which was ironically 8 years ago this week.  This truth has been my greatest source of encouragement as I run my race (which has felt more like dragging a cart through mud on most days).  I looked at prayer in the context of an incomplete view of Luke 18:1-8.  The first 5 verses are the parable of the widow who persistently nagged and bugged the unrighteous judge for justice in her plea, and he eventually gave in to her because that annoying persistence.  The problem is, I stopped at verse 5.  I thought that prayer was just me asking God for something until I finally wore Him down and He gave me my request.  The problem with this paradigm is that it leaves you feeling like a nuisance.  It actually made me feel almost like God’s adversary; that I had to wrestle Him into releasing something that He didn’t really want to give.  That’s no way to foster a life of prayer.  I don’t know about you, but if I get the feeling that somebody’s annoyed with me, I tend to look for friendship somewhere else.

So that first weekend, I took a class entitled “Bridal Intercession.”  The lesson I learned was centered in the story of Esther.  What I had never considered in Esther’s story is that when she approached the king with her request, she was also approaching the one who was greatly in love with her.  If you recall, the king had asked for all the beautiful, single women of the land (which was impressively expansive) to take a full year to make themselves beautiful, and then present themselves to him.  He picked Esther.  He loved her more than all the other women.  So the big lesson I learned was that God, the Judge, the One who hears my prayers, is madly in love with me.  When Esther approached the king, she had not seen him for a full month.  Even though I go through dry seasons where I lag in my commitment to prayer, I can have confidence that He still loves me.  My favourite verse from the Song of Solomon is: “O my dove…let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely” (SOS 2:14).  No matter where I’m at, or how far I’ve been away, He is still captured by one glance of my eyes.  He loves it each and every time I turn to Him.  And I have found that if I can remind myself of this fact, in the face of all the condemnation and guilt I feel for falling short and choosing worthless, fleeting things instead of communion with the One who loves me, then I can easily get back to living a lifestyle of prayer.  I don’t know about you, but if I get the feeling that somebody’s REALLY happy to see me, I tend to spend as much time with them as I can.  I’m a real sucker for love and acceptance.

So I encourage you to fight to remind yourself of this fact:  that God is deeply in love with you, and that He actually moves at the sound of your voice.  Even if you feel condemned over a lack of pursuit, it’s okay!  He gets it!  Jesus walked in our shoes, He knows the weakness of our flesh and the temptations we face.  And just like the father of the prodigal son, He runs to us when we turn to Him again.  We take 1 step, He takes 10.  So if you keep falling off the bandwagon (like me), take heart:  He still REALLY likes you, and He still wants to hear your voice and see your face in the secret place.

- Brad