Prayer Style for the Attention Deficient

Monday, October 26, 2009

I don’t know about you, but prayer has always been something that is very difficult for me.

I think it has to do with my inability to actually focus if there’s ANYTHING else around within a mile radius that might emit a sound, interesting visual or odd smell. Yup, pretty much anything disrupts my concentration on trying to communicate with the divine. I think mostly it has to do with a sort of aimless wandering approach that I’ve “developed” over time. I’ve tried various prayer formulas, like the ACTS formula.

For those of you not familiar with the ACTS formula, it’s an acronym that helps guide your prayers by topic. Here’s the breakdown:

A - Adoration
C - Confession
T - Thanksgiving
S - Supplications

This was great for awhile. And then it turned very generic. I’m not sure why, but all my prayers ended up sounding the same. It was very frustrating. I guess if you think about talking to a friend, you never use such a formula. You just talk about what’s on your heart. Needless to say, ACTS fell by the wayside.

Recently at my church we had a series called, “Praying the Psalms.” That was pretty great actually! We would read through a Psalm and then literally pray it by ourselves, as if we were the author, sometimes rewriting the sentiments in our own words. While it wasn’t something I could do on a regular basis, it gave me a clue into my own needs for successful prayer time. I apparently needed time set aside for a very focused task. I guess I pray like I work.

So I’ve come up with the formula that is working for me for now. I have made up a short series to pray over: in this case, the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22. Every day, I pray about one characteristic, whether it’s kindness, gentleness or faithfulness. Sometimes I have to repeat them if they didn’t sink in or if I had a particularly trying to applying it for that day. I have to admit, I think I took 3 days each on Patience and Faithfulness. Those ones were hard. But that also pushed to me look up those things in the Bible (another thing I’m not particularly prone to) in order to see where those things come from and what they actually mean.

Somehow the idea of keeping thing short and focused allow me to actually DO this. It’s been good so far and I’m looking forward to figuring out what my next series is going to be. I just wanted to share in case this helps any of you!

1. Hey, cool, thanks for sharing that.  You know, speaking of looking stuff up to find out what it means, your post made me wonder “what is prayer?” Like, in the sense of what do I expect out of it and what do I intend to get out of it, or expect to happen, effect, whatever.  That might be an interesting search in the Bible.  For myself, I can’t really answer it easily. 

   Well, no, I can.  I didn’t think I could, but if someone asked, I’d say prayer is talking to God.  And sometimes He tells you something He wants you to pray.  Other times it rises up out of your spirit (yes, we have spirits! we ARE spirits!)...  something like that.  The whole effecting change or whatever, that’s a harder one to explain.  I’ve read a bit about it here and there, but don’t know for certain that I understand it well enough to explain it.

   Anyway!  Yeah, I’m a wanderer in prayer!  Always have been.  And I don’t know how to really define or advise others for prayer, and don’t know how I even focus or do it.  But somehow I do.  Go figure.  God is good.  That’s the magic of it, of Him, I think. 

   This long comment brought to you by someone who should be getting warm in the futon instead of freezing because he’s typing…

   P.S.

   Posted by Ramone  on  11/03  at  07:18 AM

2. P.S.  (oops, forgot to add it above) ...recently I’ve been *writing* prayers a lot.  Not “prayers” like some kind of form with a flourish of words, but more like just questions (and answers).  Somehow the exercise of writing helps me get stuff out inside me, and I hear Him answer while I’m doing that.  I’ve written stuff to God here and there in little books or scraps of paper over the years, but this is just getting crazy recently.  I wonder how long He’ll let the trend last, haha.  I think John Eldredge’s “Walking With God” might’ve helped there, but not consciously.  Just more like he and I do similar things with writing or typing.

   Posted by Ramone  on  11/03  at  07:21 AM

3. Writing is definitely a good idea. I think that helps focus things. I’ve never been good at that bit for some reason. I end up being very distracted thinking about my writing and linguistic style, knowing that I’ll look at it years from now and criticize myself (as is the nature of a perfectionist).

   Still I need to give it a shot. Maybe I’ll do that for my next series.

   Posted by  on  11/05  at  03:22 PM

4. I like all your ideas of prayers.  In the bible it talks about fasting and pray, I will do some today as I am staying home on a clear liquid diet.

   Posted by  on  12/09  at  10:47 AM