How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

My belief is that when you’re telling the truth, you’re close to God.

The Bible is often more honest than the church. Many of the Psalms (the Jewish prayer book) are not happy-clappy songs but cries of unresolved

One of the Bible’s greatest patriarchs, Jacob, wrestled with God in a night of prayer so violent that he was wounded—never healed—for the rest of his life.[14]

The truly remarkable thing about all the rude, irreverent, self-pitying prayers recorded in the Bible is not that they were prayed in the first place but that they were never redacted from the text. These outrageous prayers were prayed by a litany of antiheroes—capable of arch narcissism, crass stupidity, and the very heights of nobility too. A bit like you and me.

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. . . . These, perhaps . . . come from a deeper level than feeling. . . . God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard. C. S. LEWIS, LETTERS TO MALCOLM

But here is the great and inescapable truth—taught in Scripture, modeled by Christ, and advocated

without exception by all the heroes of our faith: You cannot grow in prayer without some measure of effort and discomfort, self-discipline and self-denial. Just as you cannot get physically fit without regular exercise and a healthy diet, so your spiritual growth will be determined, to a very significant extent, by the prayer exercises you choose (or do not choose) to establish and sustain.

It has been the discipline of effective communication, of frequent date nights, of apologizing regularly and renewing our vows annually that has kept our love alive.

Delight without discipline eventually, inevitably dissipates. It runs out of steam. But when delight and discipline learn to dance, relationships thrive. They mature and endure.

A Christian who prays only when they feel like it may survive but will never thrive. Their vast, innate potential will be stunted because grace

needs a little space to take root between the cracks of a person’s life. If anyone ever had an excuse not to pray in any kind of regimented way, it was surely the sinless Son of God. Jesus could so easily have argued (as some do today), “Look, everything I do is basically prayer. My life is a continual conversation with the Father. When I sleep, when I drink a cup of water, it is prayer. I don’t

need special times and places. I don’t need to be restricted by rules.” But read the Gospels and you’ll see that Jesus prayed diligently, regularly...

Nicky Gumbel’s The Bible in One Year, the Northumbria Community’s Celtic Daily Prayer, and Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours.[23]

simplicity, honesty, and perseverance.

How did she survive the loss of nine children, and the heartbreak of a volatile marriage, without becoming broken and bitter?

Finding herself called to make disciples not of distant nations but of her own little tribe at home, she applied herself to the task tirelessly.

by praying faithfully for those ten children, Susanna Wesley, a housewife with a hard life from a small town in rural England, became the mother of some 80 million Methodists in more than 130 nations today.

To start we must stop.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. BLAISE PASCAL

THE HUMAN SOUL is wild and shy.

Celtic folklore depicted it as a stag, noble and coy. It hides away from the noise of life, refusing to come on command like some slavering, domesticated pet. But when we are still, it emerges, inquisitive and quiveringly alive.

If we want to get better at hearing the one who speaks in “a still small voice,” we must befriend silence.[3]

3] If we are to host the presence of the one who says, “Be still, and know that I am God,” we must ourselves become more present.[4]

We expect his voice to boom like thunder, but mostly...

expect him to wear hobnailed boots, but he tiptoes and hides in the crowd. We expect him to be strange, but he “comes to us disguised as our life.”[5] The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own...

who he actually is. To “be still before the LORD and wait pat...

But the sages teach us that true prayer is not so much something we say, nor is it something we do: It is something we become. It is not transactional but relational.

And it begins, therefore, with an appropriate awareness of the one to whom we come. The Parable of the

And so God speaks firmly into the cacophony

of human activity. The Master commands the creature to “Sit!” Jesus rebukes the storm. “He makes me lie down,” as the famous psalm puts it.[7]

God understands our deep need for stillness, order, and freedom from ultimate responsibility, because he has designed us to live humbly, seasonally, and at

peace. He himself rested and established a Sabbath, inviting each one of us to press pause regularly, saying, “Be still, and know that I am God.”[8]

“Why don’t you take a vacation from being god and let me be God instead for a change?”

Eugene Peterson says that “life’s basic decision is rarely, if ever, whether to believe in God or not, but whether to worship or compete with him.”[9] One of the main differences between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you!

A tyranny of demands and distractions strikes up in the unfamiliar silence like a brass band parading around my skull.

One Augustinian monk describes this memorably as that “inner chaos going on in our heads, like some

wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the emba...

You become more aware of your own presence in place

and time and of God’s gentle, subsuming presence around and within you.

Five hundred years ago, Saint John of the Cross captured the tranquility of such moments in a lovely phrase: “my house being now all stilled.”[11] The lights are off, the doors are locked, the street outside has fallen silent, and inside, every living thing has

been put to bed. Finally, I am ready to host the whispering King.

relax, breathe, speak, and repeat.

Sometimes I am too wound up to find inner stillness in any of these sedentary ways. When this happens, I will instead use physical exercise to burn off a little adrenaline

and calm my mind. It’s a shame that so few of the experts on prayer have ever acknowledged the importance of movement and exercise for those of us who are active learners and external processors

began to realize that serenity does not always have to be silent, cerebral, solitary, or even static. Stillness can be active.

In fact, recent medical research has discovered that exercise can be more effective than sitting still as a way of calming the brain, diffusing stress, and stimulating clarity of thought.

Opening to God: Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer by David G. Benner

Wherever you go, keep God in mind; whatever you do, follow the example of holy Scripture; wherever you are, stay there and do not move away in a hurry. If you keep to these guide-lines, you will be saved. ANTHONY OF THE DESERT, AD 251–356

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! PHILIPPIANS 4:4

We are hardwired to wonder and therefore to worship.