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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!