Who Taught You How to Pray?
For people who belonged to the church from the day of their baptism as an infant, it may seem that they have always known how to pray. Perhaps they learned “Now I lay me down to sleep”, kneeling at the foot of their bed as part of their bedtime routine; perhaps they proudly recited all the words to “Our Father” before they could recite the alphabet. For those of us who came to Christ as adults, prayer may have been more of a challenge. Like anything worth doing, prayer takes time – time that we weren’t used to setting aside. It’s a skill, too: the knack of focussing, of listening as well as speaking, of including “I love you” and “Thank-you” along side all the “please grant O Lord” petitions. And developing skills takes both knowledge and practice.
Church camps know this: they slip in some knowledge of prayer and some practice “quiet times” in between canoing and archery; and Sunday preachers and even televangelists occasionally speak on the subject of prayer along with a bit of how-to advice. Through such occasional teaching, “everybody knows” about prayer that it should be a daily practice; that you should go off by yourself as Jesus did; that best practice is to get up half an hour early(!?) and journal while you pray over a passage of scripture (only multi-tasking morning people need bother trying this advice!); that your prayer should follow the acronym “ACTS” — standing for “adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication”; that you can “pray without ceasing” just by chatting with God while you debug C++ code and wash dishes; and that those little single sentences you shoot off to God when you notice something distressing or inspiring — “arrow prayers” — can be part or all of an active prayer life. If you’re like me, an adult convert to Christianity who never had the benefit of “Now I lay me down to sleep”, you have probably tried all of these. And, like me, you may have found that however much you want to call on God’s name while debugging computer programs, it’s rarely a successful way to “pray without ceasing”; and that getting up a half hour early only lasts for a day or two before sheer exhaustion overwhelms good intentions. In fact, the greatest truth I have discovered about prayer is that it never gets easy. We are always being called back to prayer, to strive to build up that area of our lives, to delve into practices that bring us closer to God and open us more to hearing God’s will for us.
In fact, the Church has been experiencing that continuous call to renewed prayer, for about two thousand years. So, it’s not surprising that the Church has developed many different prayer strategies to help Christians deepen their prayer life, with different strategies being more or less popular in different denominations. Three strategies that are less well known in protestant churches are the use of prayer beads or prayer ropes, Lectio Divina, and Praying the Hours. In August, Emmanuel Community Church will be offering a seminar series on prayer to introduce and explore these prayer practices. The seminars will be offered on August 9, 16 and 23; and each seminar will cover one of the three forms of prayer. Participants at the August 9 seminar will have the opportunity to create their own set of prayer beads.
The Friday prayer seminars will be held at the church (3003 28ST SE) and also online at the church’s Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/qui-cnnu-obf Anyone who would like to attend online and also join in making their own set of prayer beads can pick up a set of materials at the church on August 8. If you would rather get your own supplies, you will need from 28 to 150 small beads of a consistent size and shape, 5 to 15 larger beads of a different shape, DD silk thread, a beading needle, an optional three-point connection medallion, and a pendant (usually a crucifix or tassle)