Tips to Enrich Our Prayer Lives

Written by Tonia Bartlett

I remember sitting in a prayer gathering in Egypt during my first year overseas, listening to one of the Egyptian women pray, and thinking to myself, “Dang. I want to talk to God the way she does.” There was something deeply personal and intimate about her prayers that clued me in, maybe for the first time, on how impersonal my own conversations with the Lord were.

Sometimes I think that in American church culture, when we try to address the topic of prayer we get overly focused on teaching about why we ought to pray. In doing so, we fail to acknowledge that most of us don’t pray as often or deeply as we “should” because we’re uncertain on how to pray.

I feel strongly that prayer is a skill that’s practiced and honed, and it’s something we get better at and more comfortable with as we develop the skill. I’m not saying that prayer is not possible without teaching and practice. Like all habits of discipleship, any believer can do it, whether they’ve practiced or not. What I am saying is that with practice and instruction on different ways to approach prayer, it becomes more natural, more enjoyable, and more effective.

I wanted to share a few tips I’ve picked up over time that have made my prayer life richer. While prayer still gets difficult in seasons, these are ways the Lord has routinely called me back when things get hard.

Pray with other people.

It was in that room with my sister in Christ that I realized the riches of prayer for the very first time! I have found that my personal theology and understanding of God are most on display when I’m praying aloud, and I am refined by hearing others on display.

Additionally, as a middle school teacher, I think that the best methods for learning start with modeling. Praying with others, particularly those gifted in prayer, is a great chance for us to be exposed to and trained up in new aspects of prayer. It’s worth mentioning that pre-service prayer on Sunday mornings at 9:45 is a joyful space to pursue prayer with others!

Set a timer to build stamina. Start small!

If I could make a recommendation to every single member of our church for how to grow in prayer, this would be it. Settling into prayer is hard. The beauty of the timer is that it tells my brain, “Hey, you can rush through this, but we’re going to be here for the next 5 minutes whether you do or not.” I find myself so much more likely to slow down, and really rest in prayer with that timer than I am without it.

Word to the wise: start small. If your prayers right now are usually only 30-seconds long, don’t start the timer at 15 minutes. You’re likely going to be frustrated and bored if you do that. Build stamina by starting with a 3-minute timer. Over the course of a month, work your way up to longer intervals of prayer. There is no “destination” to arrive at with prayer. Start with where you’re at, and be met with the Lord’s delight in your pursuit of Him.

Pray through scripture.

Pray God’s very own words back to Him. What’s so cool about this is that we can do it with any scripture! Something you could do is find a Psalm or passage that resonates with you and put it into your own words as you pray. Here’s an example of what that prayer might sound like, using Psalm 23:1-3.

God, you’re my shepherd. You guide me through the fields I’m walking in every single day. In you, I have everything I need - I don’t want anything apart from you. Would you make that true for my heart? I don’t want to want anything apart from you. Father, your will for my life is to make me rest. To bring me to the lush and beautiful places. You take me next to quiet streams, and you nourish my soul so that I’m refreshed. Father, will you guide me this week to walk in righteous paths? I want to bring glory to your name.

Follow a liturgy, prayer book, or methodology.

I’ve found liturgies helpful at different times in my life. Right now, I’m using a Puritan prayer book called Valley of Vision in my quiet times, and it’s been really meaningful. Sometimes these resources feel dry and dead to me, but in other seasons they’re rich and nourishing. Allow your intuition to guide you on this one.

There are many different prayer methods to use too, that can be helpful. A few I’ve benefited from are:

1. ACTS - move through prayer in four phases: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.

2. The Lord’s Prayer - let the different phases of the Lord’s prayer guide you.

   1. “Hallowed be thy name…” - use this section to praise God and give him glory.

   2. “Your Kingdom come…” - His is a Kingdom without disease, fear, grief or pain. Where would you invite the Lord’s Kingdom into your life this week?

   3. “Give us today our daily bread…” - this is a moment where you would ask for the Lord’s specific provision. What “daily bread” do you or your family need right now?

3. Concentric circles - this is a prayer that starts with the smallest level of community, and scales up. Start by praying for self, then for family, then for community, then for city, state, country, world, etc.

4. Open hands - this is a prayer that involves body posture. At the beginning, you pray with your palms down, and just list the things you want to give over to the Lord and be freed from today - sins, burdens, worries. Then, you flip your hands over, and listen for or recount the things that you can receive from the Lord today. It’s beautiful to see what the Holy Spirit will speak through this prayer.

Create a prayer calendar

I like to take a monthly calendar and write in specific topics that I’ll pray for each day. I usually have things that repeat, so for example, each day of the week I’ll pray for a family member, on a 6-day cycle. But then I’m also a teacher, so I might put each of my students into a day of the month, so that over the course of the month, I pray for each of them. Or I’ll specifically designate a day of the week to pray for my finances, one for my colleagues, another for my physical health.

Word to the wise: There are days or stretches where I don’t pray for what’s on the list, and find it really tempting to feel guilty, or feel a need to “catch up” on the things I missed. This prayer calendar really requires an attitude of grace if it’s something you want to try, but this tool brings a lot of clarity to my prayer life, and keeps my prayers fresh.

Open up to God like He’s in the room.

This isn’t so much an action step as it is a posture shift, but it makes a beautiful difference in engaging with the Father. I often find myself tempted to pray in cliches or pray vaguely for situations I don’t really want to open up to God about. Imagine sitting across from a friend at coffee and talking to them that way. How silly would that be? There’s something raw and vulnerable about telling the Lord how frustrated, angry, and grieved I am. Doing this with God is a big posture shift, but it makes prayer rich and compelling.

I hope you will find some of these tips helpful in your prayer life!

Learning From Stories of Injustice and Hope

Written by Brian Grasso

I serve as the Executive Director of Simple Charity, a nonprofit that inspires Christian college students to grow in solidarity with people experiencing poverty and injustice. While doing the initial fundraising for Simple Charity’s launch, a few advisors recommended listening to the stories of people who have experienced poverty before launching out to build a nonprofit that works to alleviate poverty.

I thought this was great advice, so I reached out to twenty nonprofits to ask if we could interview one person who has benefited from their programs. With permission from these interviewees, Simple Charity published their stories in their own voices. Then, a friend suggested that these stories could make a great podcast. I recruited two Duke students to serve as hosts, and Simple Charity’s Two Coins podcast was born.

Two Coins is a podcast with highly-produced, immersive stories of people who have overcome poverty and injustice. I believe that solidarity with the poor begins with humility, with a posture of listening and learning. Here are some of the things that I have learned through the stories in Two Coins.

I have what I have because of grace, not just my own hard work.

John Njoroge grew up in rural Kenya in a household that at times was “so poor that we didn’t even have salt.” He shared his story in the Two Coins podcast about how he was taken in by a missionary family, excelled in secondary school, went to America for college, and eventually earned a PhD in philosophy. Now, Dr. John Njoroge speaks throughout the African continent on the credibility of the Christian faith.

Stories like Dr. Njoroge’s remind me that while talent is equally distributed throughout the world, opportunity is not. Successful people are prone to believe the myth that the world is generally a fair place and that those who make it to middle-class stability earned their comfortable lifestyle solely through their own hard work. But if we are going to live in solidarity with the poor like Jesus did, we have to learn to be “poor in spirit” like he taught us to be, and this means acknowledging that all that we have is a gift from the Lord.

When we listen to the stories of people who have experienced poverty and injustice, we realize that many of them work just as hard as us and simply haven’t been given the same opportunities in life. This should humble us and help us to replace a spirit of entitlement with a spirit of gratitude.

The people doing the best work to combat injustice are people who have experienced it.

Vennila Mani works at a burn victim hospital in Bangalore, India, and is one of Dr. Prema Dhanraj’s best employees. She is able to empathize with patients because she herself was a victim of a horrendous burn accident when she was a little girl. At the time, there was no facility in the city that specialized in burns, so her recovery was slow, painful, and terrifying.

Vennila’s work as a nurse at Agni Raksha hospital represents a principle about mercy work that runs throughout the stories in Two Coins: Those who have experienced an injustice are the best equipped to help others experiencing the same injustice. Consider Claire Hababu who was a victim of human trafficking and now works with Love Justice International to prevent it. She can spot the warning signs because she herself was a victim. Or consider how John Njoroge, whose story I shared earlier, now runs a children’s home that serves 31 vulnerable kids. He says, “I see myself in these kids.”

What does this principle mean for people who want to respond to injustice but haven’t experienced it themselves? We should look for nonprofits that empower people like Vennila, Claire, and John to serve their own communities and then give, pray, and serve to support them however we can. We don’t have to be the ones on the frontlines. Oftentimes, that’s not the most effective place for us anyways.

When we give to charities that empower and employ people who have experienced poverty and injustice, we are allowing community leaders to be agents of transformation.

God can heal, restore, redeem, transform, and empower all of us, regardless of what we’ve been through.

The stories in Two Coins are intense. In one episode, a woman named Kika shares the story of being the victim of a devasting conflict-related rape in a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After this horrifying experience, Kika was transferred to the only hospital in the region that could care for her, a missionary hospital called Heal Africa. Today, years later, Kika is a nurse at that same hospital helping poor and vulnerable children to heal from similar trauma.

She says that she wants to share her story publicly in order to give people hope that God can heal anyone. She said,

“When I underwent this, I lost any hope of being healed one day and of becoming a normal person. So, I share my story to bring back the hope for other women who underwent the same situation as me--to bring them hope to get healed one day. Because God is operating miracles for people through other people and organizations like Heal Africa. So I share my story to give hope to those women who've lost hope.”

Stories like Kika’s throughout Two Coins are reminders that God is a miracle-working God who is capable not just of healing us of our pain, but of transforming us and using us to bring healing to others.

My Father's Sacrificial Love

My Father’s Sacrificial Love

Lawrence Yoo

When I was a kid, living in Pennsylvania, my father worked two jobs. He would leave early in the morning to go to a steel mill, work there all day, then come home and have an early dinner with our family before going to his second job as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. He did this six days a week without a vacation or break. This was his life.

One of my early memories is asking my father for money to go to a school-sponsored trip to an amusement park. I don’t even remember where we went, but I distinctly remember seeing my father’s hands as he reached into his wallet to give me the money. I saw open sores, blisters, and burns. I saw hands that were chapped, cracked, and broken in so many places, and I realized for the first time what that meant for me. Those painful broken hands were willingly reaching into his wallet so I could go on a trip that I can’t even remember now. Those hands willingly worked in front of a hot fire just so my sister and I could have a better life. In that moment, I learned so much about sacrificial love.

My dad wasn’t a perfect father. He made his mistakes like all people do, but he gave me a picture of what sacrificial love could look like and that picture has lasted a lifetime. It prepared my heart to see and know the sacrificial love that Jesus shows us through his nailed pierced hands on the cross and the scars that remained even in his resurrected body.

1 John 3:1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” Part of our heavenly father’s lavish love is found in his willingness to sacrifice for us. Whether or not you had an earthly example, I pray you would be able to see and experience our heavenly father’s lavish love, and from that place of knowing you are loved, you would be able to reflect God’s sacrificial love to the children around you.