Building a Rhythm of Prayer

Prayer is the most natural thing we can do as human beings because it is in our very design to communicate with the one who created us. Can a rhythm of prayer lead to transformation?

Sep 13, 2024

person touching hands — Photo by Michael Heuss on Unsplash

Hey friends!

First of all, I want to thank each of you for your patience with me over these last few months as I have been settling into a new job and life in London. I know my posts have been less frequent, but I promise to get back into a steady rhythm with you all again. Speaking of rhythm, this week I want to talk with you about a rhythm of prayer.

September has always been one of my favorite months in London. The sun often lingers well into October and I find the month to be just quiet enough to settle my spirit as I stretch gently away from the full weekends of summer. Although winter is closer than I’d like (I can feel it in the misty cool mornings and see it as the sky darkens a bit earlier each day), I will soak in the slowing down and bask in the warmth of the not yet finished summer sun.

In my last post, I mentioned how I would begin a series on the practices of Jesus. And here we are! For the next nine posts, I will be talking through Jesus’s rhythms of life — core practices that can help lead us into living life to the fullest. Along the way, I’ll be sharing stories, including some surprise guests, and ultimately speaking on my own joys and struggles with these rhythms.

My hope is that you feel invited to give them a try. And my deep desire is that when you do, you experience the transformation they bring. First up on the list is one of my favorites, prayer.

So, let’s dig in together.

Let me begin by saying, prayer is the most natural thing we can do as human beings because we are actually designed to live in close proximity to the one who created us.

At Glastonbury this year, which if you don’t know, is one of the biggest music festivals in the UK, Coldplay released their new song live on stage. The song titled, “We Pray”, pulsed through a crowd of over 100,000 people in person and filled the lounges and homes of millions of fans watching online.

It was quite remarkable really. One of the biggest bands in the world releasing a song about prayer. I think just about every sermon the following Sunday in churches across the UK mentioned it. People were captivated by words so many could relate to but no one really talked about.

And yet, research continues to show how common prayer really is. Pew Research has found that more than half of Americans pray every day, and 20% of Americans with no religious affiliation admit to praying daily. Even more shockingly, other studies reveal over 20% of athiests and agnostics pray daily in times of personal trouble or crisis. As Coldplay says, “We pray.”

Although these statistics may seem quite surprising, in truth, it is no surprise at all. Because the reality is that prayer is the most natural thing we can do. It is actually in our design as human beings to pray. We were meant to live in close proximity to the Creator of the Universe and prayer is the path of connection.

When I was first dipping my toes in the water of faith again in my twenties, one of the first things I experimented with was prayer. I didn’t tell a soul about it. But, as life seemed to get more challenging, I found myself curious about reaching out to this seemingly distant God to see if he would actually respond.

I had grown up in an evangelical Christian home in the states, so prayer wasn’t completely foreign to me, but after walking away from my faith in my teens, it had been over a decade since I tried to pray again in an intentional way. The thing was, I never stopped believing God existed, but I did stop believing that it mattered that he did. God seemed to me to be this distant, unrelatable, judgemental figure. And, the longer I lived apart from him, the more distant he seemed. But as my internal world began to get more confusing, I was desperate for anything to help me understand who I was.

Things came to a head in the middle of my M.A. program where I found myself completely lost. I needed help and I had no idea where to get it, so I found myself tumbling back into a desperate attempt at prayer.

At first, it felt strange thinking about praying. What was I supposed to say? Would God really listen? Was I too far gone? Would he even care?

In fact these thoughts were central to why I resisted prayer for so long. I felt so far away from God. I also felt an enormous amount of shame for the life I was living which completely rejected him. Surely God wouldn’t want to listen to my worries.

But, I was grappling with some pretty big things and I didn’t know who to turn to.

I was lost when it came to identity — I had no clue who I was really. I had spent most of my teenage years and early twenties reinventing myself over and over again, trying to find something that felt like me and yet always falling short.

I was confused when it came to vocation — I had no idea what my purpose was or what I would do for work when I finished my degree.

I was struggling pretty regularly with panic attacks — something I suffered in silence with for years. I found myself continually worrying about my health, struggling to sleep at night, and fearful of the future.

And one day, I got desperate enough to pray.

I asked God if he was real and if he would help me and in an instant, my entire body felt like it was filled with light. I felt love wash over me. I felt this peace which made no sense at all pulse through my heart and my mind. I felt seen, accepted, and deeply loved. All in a single moment.

I sent up the simplest of prayers from the most desperate of places and God responded in the most incredible way.

This was the first time I encountered God’s love.

I was twenty-five years old and this moment changed everything. It still took me about five years to come around to the idea of becoming a Christian and committing my life to Jesus. And, those five years were full of challenges and setbacks and all sorts of mistakes. It took me a long time to walk into a church building willingly. It took me even longer to believe I could be forgiven, accepted, and loved by God exactly as I was. But, that prayer and God’s answer sparked a change in the trajectory of my life — prayer mattered. It really could change things. It really could change me.

And, more shockingly, God was actually present. He wasn’t distant or uninterested. You see, the second I called out to him in prayer, he was already there waiting. I had built up this idea that prayer was this thing only for the most holy of people, and yet the second I tried it, it was the most natural thing I could do. The more time I spent in prayer, the more my heart began to soften and change. I was learning how to love myself again — how to love others. Over time, my desires changed and shifted. Somehow I was becoming more myself — the me I had spent my whole life searching for. Bit by bit, prayer was transforming me.

This is the case for all of us.

Prayer in its most simple definition is talking and being with God. And the truth? God is always sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for you to seek him.

It is in our very design to communicate with the one who created us. God longs to meet with us in prayer, so the very second we make time to pray, he is already there waiting and listening.

Prayer can come in all different forms — it can be wordless, it can be rambling, it can be musical, poetic, basic, or a raw outpouring of emotion. Prayer can be silent or noisy. Regardless of the shape it takes, prayer is how we are present with God.

John Mark Comer says, “Prayer is the portal to life with God.”1

Nothing could be more true. Prayer is how we access God. It’s how we learn to hear his voice. It’s how we open ourselves up to him. It’s how we access the heart of the Father.

Prayer is how he renews our own hearts and minds. It is how we find out who we are and what we’re created to do. Prayer is at the center of our very being. And, we were created to pray. So, if we were created to pray, how do we do it?

The historical biographies of Jesus which can be read in the New Testament Gospels are the best resource we have when it comes to instructions for a good life. Jesus lived a perfect life and luckily, we have access to his teachings through scripture.

Throughout the Gospels, we not only have the biography of Jesus, a historical account of his life, but we have records of his followers learning and apprenticing under him. There were a million things they could have asked Jesus about his way of living and yet, one specific request is recorded in the Gospels — the disciples ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.”2

Out of all the things we can ask to learn from Jesus, this is the most important. Because everything that Jesus did came out of prayer. If prayer was the center of his life, shouldn’t it also be the center of ours?

Several times over the course of the Gospels, Jesus reminds the disciples that he only does what the Father tells him to do.3 We read time after time in scripture that Jesus chooses to slip away alone to a quiet place to be with God and pray. Because he was teaching us something very important — prayer is our direct line to God. It is only through prayer that we can live out our identity and calling in the fullness of God’s intention.

In response to the disciples request, Jesus gives one of the most famous sections of writing in all the Gospels — the Lord’s prayer.

Jesus says,

This, then, is how you should pray:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.4

There are entire sermon series, books, and courses written around this one section of scripture. There is so much we could unpack and learn from these words, but at the very basic level, Jesus provides a format to help us structure our own prayers. He begins with adoration, moves to intercession, petitions God for support, repents and seeks forgiveness, and asks for God’s help.

This template for prayer can be so useful, especially in times when we can’t find the words to pray. There are times when I sit in silence before God and my prayers come easily. There are times when I find my words, I settle my spirit, and I listen well to his voice.

But, there are also times when I am trying to pray through pain. The words don’t seem to take shape. Or, my mind keeps racing and my worries bubble up within me and yet still don’t find their way out into prayers. Sometimes in deep suffering, prayer can feel like another thing required of us when we have nothing left to give.

It’s in those moments where Jesus’s prayer helps me. His liturgy guides me through my prayer when I can’t quite find the words myself. His prayer reminds me that God is so much bigger than my troubles, that he is present in all my seasons, and that I can pray for his will to be done knowing he loves me and has good plans for me.

24/7 Prayer has a great acronym PRAY to help people begin to pray:

“P – Pause; breathe deeply and be still in God’s presence.

R – Rejoice; what’s been good today? Thank God for it.

A – Ask God to help you and those you care about.

Y – say Yes to God; welcome His love, His plans and His presence into your day.”5

This can be really useful in those moments when you’re not sure where to begin. Because even though prayer is the most natural thing we can do, sometimes we struggle to settle ourselves. And when I’m in seasons where prayer is harder than usual, I think back to Jesus’s prayer or this simple acronym, and it guides me along to enter spaces of prayer with a bit more ease.

And, God is always there, waiting for me to meet with him.

Here's the truth of which I have come to know about prayer — sometimes God answers prayers in miraculous ways, and other times the outcome isn’t as I would hope for or my circumstances remain the same for a while — but no matter what, God always shows up when I pray and prayer always transforms me in the process.

I want to be real with you because I know not all our prayers get answered the way we’d like or in the timing we long for. Although it is true that sometimes we see our prayers answered right away, like my example earlier, other times we sit with unanswered prayer for much longer than we’d like and that is really hard.

But what I’ve come to realize the more I follow Jesus is, even when prayer does not change my circumstances right away, it always transforms me. And, transformation into the person God has designed me to be is the work of prayer.

Surrendering to God in prayer is most difficult at times because I have to overcome the part of me that still wants to do everything in my own strength — to control the outcome. Surrendering in prayer is actually saying, God, I am helpless in this. I’m not in control and I have to loosen my grip and hand it over to you. I have to trust you with this even though I want to hold onto it tightly.

And, even if the answer to my prayer takes a different shape than I envision or longer than I’d like, it’s in that surrender where the peace of God that passes all understanding guards my heart and mind in Christ.6

Prayer changes me.

It transforms me.

And, eventually, it changes things externally too. Sometimes right away, sometimes it’s a longer, more winding journey. Often not in the way I thought, but somehow better in the end. Because God is always faithful.

At times, this truth requires sitting in mystery and praying for his will to be done. At times, it requires trust that God is working behind the scenes even when we can’t see it. Always it requires a deep knowing that you are loved beyond all measure and your prayers, each and every one of them, are treasured by the one who created you.

Saying this all does not to minimize how deeply painful unanswered prayer can be. I have plenty of unanswered prayers I am waiting on the Lord to fulfill — things that I’m still longing to see come to pass and promises that I am waiting on God for that feel larger than life.

I have heard and witnessed plenty of stories of miraculous answered prayers —I’ve experienced quite a few miracles myself. But, I also have plenty of stories of unanswered prayer, of waiting for God in desperate moments and still not seeing the promise fulfilled.

And yet, through it all, this is what I’ve learned. When you come to God in prayer, he listens. Scripture says he bottles up our tears7 and he hears every prayer8. Some don’t get answered right away or the way we’d like, but God is constantly weaving a redemption story over our individual lives and over the world. There is a larger narrative where all the puzzle pieces fit — where all the mystery is held together.

So, whatever prayer you are still waiting on, the unanswered prayer you are sitting with, please know that God is weaving a redemption story through your life and the lives of those around you.

I want to repeat that again and again and again until it soaks into you.

God is weaving a redemption story through your life.

Nothing is wasted.

Nothing is forgotten by him.

Nothing slips through the cracks.

He is present and real and deeply embedded in your joys and your suffering.

God is weaving a redemption story through your life.

Wherever you are in your journey — whatever you believe about prayer — the Creator of the Universe longs to meet you exactly where you are, exactly as you are. He loves you. He is for you.

God is weaving a redemption story through your life.

Prayer fills the thin space between our reality and God’s. Prayer lifts the curtain to let heaven break in. Prayer changes hearts and minds and circumstances and outcomes. Prayer intervenes, intercedes, intertwines. Prayer is as natural for us as breathing. We’ve actually been created to commune with the one who created us — it’s in our makeup, our original design.

You don’t need to know a formula to get it right.

You don’t need to wait for when you have your life in order.

You don’t even need to know what you believe.

You just need to reach out.

My most simplest prayers have carried the most powerful transformation — God, I don’t know what I’m doing but I need your help. God, I’m not sure how to do this, but I want to believe you’re real. God, I am here, will you speak? God, I’m tired. I’m lost. I’m thankful. I’m anxious. I’m joyful. I’m disappointed.

Speak to him.

Pray and see what happens. Because I promise you, he is longing to speak and already listening. Just as quickly as a prayer takes shape in your thoughts and before it forms into words and escapes into the air, he has already heard it.

Prayer is how we access his heart and building a rhythm of prayer into your life will transform you.