A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

By seeing how life and God weave together, you’ll discover the joy of living as God’s child, experiencing the adventure of walking closely with your Father and Good Shepherd.

In the broader culture and in our churches, we prize intellect, competency, and wealth. Because we can do life without God, praying seems nice but unnecessary. Money can do what prayer does, and it is quicker and less time-consuming. Our trust in ourselves and in our talents makes us structurally independent of God.

Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime.

Many Christians haven’t stopped believing in God; we have just become functional deists, living with God at a distance.

The difficulty of coming just as we are is that we are messy. And prayer makes it worse. When we slow down to pray, we are immediately confronted with how unspiritual we are, with how difficult it is to concentrate on God. We don’t know how bad we are until we try to be good. Nothing exposes our selfishness and spiritual powerlessness like prayer.

Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the non-personal, nonreal praying that you’ve been taught.

How do we structure our adult conversations? We don’t. Especially when talking with old friends, the conversation bounces from subject to subject. It has a fun, meandering, play-like quality. Why would our prayer time be any different? After all, God is a person.

When you stop trying to be an adult and get it right, prayer will just flow because God has done something remarkable. He’s given you a new voice. It is his own. God has replaced your badly damaged prayer antenna with a new one—the Spirit. He is in you praying.

As you get the clutter off your heart and mind, it is easy to be still in God’s presence.