How To Pray In 140 Characters

When it comes to praying, more is better, right?  More words spoken means more thought put into it.  More time praying means more sincerity to the prayer.  More is better, right?

Let’s be honest, how much of our prayers are wasted with unnecessary words? We won’t argue if “more is better” when praying, but if you’re someone who gives a prayer for fifteen minutes, then Twitter may not be for you.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to pray on a platform that only gives a small window of time – 140 characters to be exact.

Grammar is thrown out the window. Just browse Twitter for a few minutes and you can quickly see that it’s widely accepted to have poor grammar on Twitter.  Instead of writing out every. single. word., people use abbreviations of their words and sentences to get the point across. For example, “Hi and thank you for retweeting my post. God bless you” can more concisely be typed, “Hi. Thx for RT. God bless U.” Is it perfect? No, but that’s Twitter.
It’s quality, not quantity. No longer are the days where we were given 1,000+ word research paper assignments and had to stretchhhhhhhhhhhh our words to hit that minimum.  (Did that bring back some painful memories of college?)  In fact, with Twitter it’s the opposite.  With such a strict limitation, a little more thought needs to be put into how you can pray for someone in 140 characters.  Losing unnecessary “filler” words leaves us with only the most important words for those needing prayer.
Use other resources if needed. If the advice above still leaves you puzzled on how to pray using 140 characters, then a backup plan may be required.  There’s nowhere that says we can’t use other resources and techniques to portray our thoughts.  For example, if you have a more detailed prayer available on a website, feel free to tweet that link to your follower for extra context.  Or instead of writing out an entire Bible chapter or multiple versus then just reference them like “Gal 2:20.”
Pray before tweeting. If you’re ready to respond to a prayer request and your mind goes blank, don’t fret.  Don’t stress too much about typing a prayer or knowing what to say in 140 characters – we know it’s difficult.  Instead of sending a cookie-cutter tweet, pray first instead.  Make sure you are connecting with God to see if He gives you specific Scripture to share or the perfect words for the situation.

Since God has promised that He hears every prayer of ours then it doesn’t always have to come through our fingertips.  He hears every single prayer for ourself and others, down to each 140 characters.