014 - Prayer Habits, Part II

If you’re anything like me, sometimes (though you hate to admit it) your prayers become a bit monotonous.

Chances are, if you’ve been a follower of Jesus for a long time, you’ve learned the phrases and words that easily roll off your tongue when you pray, and now you can recite your common prayers almost without even thinking about it. The truth is, it happens to all of us.

It’s also true that prayer was never meant to be that way. Though for many of us, prayer can easily become an apathetic aspect of our relationship with Jesus that we don’t actually give much thought, the truth is that God desires so much more intentionality and focus from us when we pray.

As we continue to dive into course-correcting some of our prayer habits, I want to remind you that God doesn’t have a perfect definition of prayer. He just wants to connect with us meaningfully and honestly. The goal of this series isn’t to shame you or guilt you into praying the “right” way. The goal is to help us recognize where we’ve gotten a little off-track in the way we pray SO THAT we can adjust and find more joy and meaning in the time we spend with God in prayer.

Habit #2 - Talking too much.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you connect with an old friend you haven’t talked to in a while, and you decide to meet for coffee or lunch to catch up. You’re super excited to chat with her, and have a lot of things you want to tell her. But when you meet up with her, she won’t let you get a word in; all she does is talk about herself and what she’s been up to, and doesn’t give you the chance to speak up.

Have you ever been there? I have. And when I leave those meetings where all I do is listen and don’t get the chance to speak up, I leave feeling like we didn’t really even connect at all. Like, what was the point of meeting to connect if only one of us got to talk?

Here’s the thing: God is always, always happy to hear your voice. He loves us so much that He listens to us any time we want to talk to Him. But God also deeply desires for us to hear His voice. And the truth is that it’s really hard to hear someone’s voice when we’re doing all the talking.

The other thing I’m learning is that God isn’t going to participate in a petty competition for our attention. So He often waits until we’re ready to listen to His words before He speaks to us, rather than trying to talk over the noise of our surroundings and our own selves. And so when we’re waiting to hear from God and wondering why He isn’t speaking, maybe we need to ask ourselves if it’s because we’re getting in the way and not actually listening for His voice.

New Habit to Form

I know it can be so awkward and uncomfortable to sit in silence. In fact, it’s a psychological truth that we are not wired to sit in the discomfort of silence, and so we often fill that silence with words - our words.

But I think the shift we have to make is actually deeper than pausing to give God space to speak (although we certainly should do that, too). The new habit we need to develop is actually the belief that God will - and wants to - talk to us. When we don’t truly believe that God is going to speak, the silence isn’t full of expectation, it’s full of emptiness. But when we can begin to believe that when we’re silent, God will speak, we will find ourselves longing more and more to simply be still before Him, waiting in anticipation for the words He will say to us.

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Published in the 014 - October 13 issue of TuesdayTribe

Written by Hannah Hladek

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash