A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

Learning to Play Again

I think this section is SUCH an inaccurate interpretation of the scriptures!!! Cringy

Another objection is busyness. When I first heard Martin Luther’s comment that he couldn’t get by unless he had three or four hours of prayer daily, I scratched my head.[3] Knowing how busy Luther was, you’d think he would want to cut out prayer. Now, years later, it makes perfect sense. In fact, the more pressure, the more I need to pray. I pray in the morning because my life is so pressured. If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.

If we think we can do life on our own, we will not take prayer seriously. Our failure to pray will always feel like something else—a lack of discipline or too many obligations. But when something is important to us, we make room for it. Prayer is simply not important to many Christians because Jesus is already an add-on. That is why, as we’ll see later, suffering is so important to the process of learning how to pray. It is God’s gift to us to show us what life is really like.