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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
Prayer is the intersection between an out-of-touch Western church and a spiritually curious Western world.
In an increasingly post-Christian America—spiritually interested but religiously suspicious, thirsty for mystical experience but “spare me the advice of anyone deemed a ‘professional,’ thank you very much”—prayer is the one aspect of the historic, orthodox Christian faith that isn’t threatening to the emerging sociocultural climate surrounding the church. In fact, it’s inviting.
It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.
Even in a very busy, very distracted world, people still make time for what really matters to them.
Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up. And we’ve learned to avoid that. So we avoid prayer.
“By praying we learn to pray.”
Prayer is more practice than theory,
In 1370, the first public clock was set up in Germany. Historians popularly point to that moment as the turning point when the world shifted from natural time to artificial time.
In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, which, among other things, cut way back on our sleep time. Prior to the light bulb, the average American slept ten hours a night.5 With the increased potential for human productivity, technology took off.
iPhone in June 2007, they gave us a tracking device for that very data. A 2016 study found that the average iPhone user touches their phone 2,617 times a day, staring at their phone screen for two and a half hours over seventy-six sessions.8 A more recent 2019 study discovered that in just three years, the figure had more than doubled to over five hours a day.9
“hurry sickness,”
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”10
hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.
“Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”
