Patts blog-Integrated prayer Sept. 30, 2011

    What a wonderful day in the neighborhood. I am writing a sermon on "The Lords Prayer," and I am walking the neighborhood praying the Scripture in hope’s the Spirit will speak during my prayer walk. Since we are in a prayer series right now called the Prayer Connection, I have been drawn to different forms of prayer. Last week we talked about “Creative Prayers for the Easily Bored.” These are prayers that are different from bowing our heads and folding our hands, but engage our bodies and require more integration into our daily routine. I have been enjoying cultivating new ways of prayer. Paul tells us in 1 Thess. 5:17-18 to “Pray without ceasing, and to give thanks in all circumstance.” So to practice this we have to pray as life comes at us not as we make time for life.

    Prayers can be with eyes wide open, with senses fully engaged and body in motion. One of my favorite ways is to pray while you walk or run. It is 71 degrees here in Memphis today so there is no excuse for me not taking my own advice. While you walk focus intently on your surroundings and become aware of specific snapshots. It might be a spiders web, dew drop on a leaf, a flower peaking out of a crack in the sidewalk. Stop for a moment and spend some time with it and notice it for its beauty and what it’s message might be like with the flower growing up from the crack in the pavement, let it reminds you that good things can and do happen during very hard and difficult times, let it guide your prayer. Andbe a good neighbor and pray for your neighbors as you pass their homes.

    Author and theologian Leonard Sweet once told me he blessed everyone every time he shook a hand whether he knew them or not. It is endless how inventive and exciting your prayer life can be when we become a little more artistic with it.

   When you are washing some dishes and the warm water and soap pour over your hands, say a prayer to cleanse your heart of anything which may be on your heart.  Drive time can be a great way of integrating an active prayer life into our active and busy days. Think of all the travel we do. We carry kids to soccer games and to music rehearsals to drive to run endless errands and to commute to work. So why waste that time particularly when you are alone.  One woman who kept putting off a daily prayer and devotional life until things in her life settled down finally realized they were not going to. So she began to pray in her car, with eyes open and hands on the wheel of course, and she referred to her car as the Rolling Sanctuary. you can get very creative with your prayers in the car. At a red light try praying for all those things that you would like stopped. Hatred, violence, injustice and resentment in your own heart. At a green light you can pray for things that you want to make more a go of. To have more love, give more love and go further at working on your relationships. 

   So you get the idea. Run with it. Let me know of some of the creative integrated prayers you use. It was suggested that I use one when being stopped by a train. I am very impatient when it comes to trains on Poplar Avenue. Seems they are always there when I pull up. Instead of becoming antsy and angry with them, I tried using each car to do as Paul asked the Thessalonians to do,  “to be grateful in all circumstance.” As each train car passes by, I gave thanks to God for all you have to be grateful for.  Praying like this may even make us not dread trains so much any more. 

    Let me know what new ways you have begun to pray in the daily and I will share them so that we all don’t just work in prayer but live life as a prayer.

Blessings,

Patt