How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Prayer is the most important activity of our lives. It is the way in which we develop a relationship with our Father in heaven. Jesus prayed and taught us to do the same. Prayer brings

us peace, refreshes our souls, satisfies our spiritual hunger, and assures us of our forgiveness. Prayer not only changes us; it also changes situations. God answers prayer.

With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this . . . MATTHEW 6:9, MSG

I realize there are times when we all just need the fastest possible route to God—when you’re skidding on your bike toward a parked car, you need

most direct communication possible: “Help!” But there’s more to prayer than asking, and God is not in a hurry. There are ways of praying that are more like exploring than imploring: woodland trails on which to shelter, places so beautiful you’ll stop and whisper praise. There are secret, intimate places to camp, and paths that take you to the highlands for a longer view

under a bigger sky. It’ll be an effort to climb, but worth ...

He will tell you things you never knew and ask you things you’ve never told.

The first was that prayer is actually, surprisingly, pretty much the most important thing in life.

Every pilgrim gets a stone in their shoe eventually. You wake up one morning thinking, Is this really all there is to knowing the Creator of one hundred billion galaxies? You read the book of Acts and ask, Why isn’t it like that anymore? Your world falls apart and you desperately need a

miracle. You stare up at the stars and feel things bigger than religious language. You say to yourself, If this thing is true, there’s got to be more power, more mystery, more actual personal experience. And so, finally, you turn to God, half wondering whether you’re any more than half-serious, and say, “Lord, teach me to pray.” And he replies, “I thought you’d never ask!”

More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day. ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, IDYLLS OF THE KING

In the words of Abraham Heschel,

“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”[2]

Our English word prayer derives from the Latin precarius. We pray because life is precarious. We pray because life is marvelous. We pray because we find ourselves at a loss for many things, but not for the simplest words like “please,” “thank you,” “wow,” and

Canadian psychologist David G. Benner describes prayer as “the soul’s native language,” observing that “our natural posture

is attentive openness to the divine.”[3]

Abraham Lincoln admitted, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom . . . seemed insufficient for that day.”[4]

Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh found himself similarly moved to pray by life’s unfathomable wonder,

“the gaping need of my senses”:

For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.[9]

But every now and again I have to pray and I do pray to God and I ask him to help me because sometimes I am suffering badly. It’s only now and again that I am able to turn to the right frequency to talk to him and there is not a doubt in my mind there is a God. I don’t need him every day. I need him

every now and again but when I do need him he is certainly there.[13]

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. MARK 1:35 The greatest person who ever lived was preeminently a man of prayer. Before launching out in public ministry, he fasted for more than a month

in the wilderness. Before choosing his twelve disciples, he prayed all night. When he heard the devastating news that his cousin, John, had been executed, “he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.”[14] After feeding five thousand people, he was understandably tired, but his response was to climb a mountain to pray.

When the pressures of fame threatened to crush him, Jesus prayed.[15] When he was facing his own death in the garden of Gethsemane, bleeding with fear and failed by his friends, he prayed.[16] Even during those unimaginable hours of physical and spiritual torment on th...

Jesus prayed and he prayed and he prayed. But it didn’t stop there. After his resurrection, Jesus commanded his disciples to follow his example so that the church was eventually born as “they all joined together constantly in prayer.”[18] And then, as it began to grow exponentially, the apostles ...

the clamor of pressing leadership respons...

It was when Peter “went up on the roof to pray” in the city of Joppa that he received a shocking vision of nonkosher animals presented as food, an epoch-defining epiphany that would catapult the gospel out from its Jewish c...

Paul’s epistles bubble and fizz with petition, with spontaneous doxologies and passionate exhortations to pray. We are engaged, he reminds the Ephesians, in active warfare against dark spiritual powers.[22]

We are caught up, he tells the Romans, in an intense heavenly prayer meeting.[23] We are edified, he tells the Corinthians, in truths revealed to us only through prayer.[24]

The Holy Spirit filled the place before he filled the people.

After decades of night-and-day prayer, I have come to believe that 99 percent of it is just showing up: making the effort to become consciously present to the God who is constantly present to us.

These were men who would go on to have extraordinary prayer lives. They would intercede until buildings shook. They would spring Peter from a high-security jail by the power of prayer. Their very shadows and handkerchiefs would sometimes heal the sick. They would receive the kinds of revelations that change cultural paradigms. And most

remarkably of all, they would one day find the grace within themselves to pray for their torturers at the very point of death.

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard Foster

You’ve got to keep it real because when life hurts, you’re going to be tempted to pretend you’re fine. And when you make a mess of things, you’re going to be tempted to hide from God (which never really works)

and end up hiding from yourself (which works quite well).

“He remembers,” as the psalmist says, “that we are dust.”[1]

Lose that sense of prayer as friendship and there’ll be nothing left but theory and technique. As the Ancient Mariner says in Coleridge’s famous poem, “He prayeth well, who loveth well.”[3]

With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply.[4]

Having advocated simplicity in prayer, he modeled it with a short, rhyming prototype that takes about thirty seconds

to recite in English and fits in a single tweet.

God invites you to pray simply, directly, and truthfully in the full and wonderful weirdness of the way he’s made you. Take a walk in the rain. Write prayers on the soles of your shoes. Sing the blues. Rap. Write Petrarchan sonnets. Sit in silence in a forest. Go for a run until you sense

God’s smile; throw yourself down a waterslide, yelling hallelujah if that’s honestly your thing. “I pray all the time,” said Native American pastor Richard Twiss: My prayers are not only talking to God. They are questions, they are dialogue, they are the burning of sage and incense. When I’m dancing in the pow-wow, every step is a prayer: I dance

prayers for the people. Sometimes I imagine my prayers, I fantasize my prayers; they’...

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton

says: God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.[10] The author Anne

Lamott wrote a refreshingly irreverent book about prayer with a title I’ve always liked: Help, Thanks, Wow. These three words, she argues, are the only prayers we will ever need. Whether or not we agree, she does a brilli...