Prayer, I’ve learned, is something like learning a new language, a foreign language. It’s also more… it’s more than a language to speak, a language we can use to get something. It’s a lifestyle… prayer is a lifestyle.

How can prayer be a lifestyle?

I think prayer prayer as a lifestyle takes it’s first step in seeing life and things of life as beyond mere pragmatism. Prayer doesn’t always have this immediate effect. Some, like Henri Nouwen, have called it a kind of divine waste of time, in the sense that by all measures of “getting things done”, prayer is a pause from action.

A pause from action…

It’s more than a pause too. I believe it is a preparation for action. It is a centering. It is a recognition, through listening, through Scripture, that our life is not captured in the moments of getting things done but rather in the grace of God, who works in us to accomplish all kinds of things great and small.

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