A Simple Way to Pray

ONE QUESTION FOLLOWS ME out of nearly every room where I have preached on prayer. Someone waits until the others have gone and asks, a little apologetically: "But what do I actually do tomorrow morning?" I have spent this whole book warning you away from technique, and I will not smuggle one in through the back door. What follows is a description of how one clergyman prays, offered the way you would show a friend around your kitchen: here is the coffee, this burner runs hot, that drawer sticks. None of it is a rule, and none of it is a lever that pries an answer out of God. Take whatever helps you pray, bend what almost helps, and let the rest go without guilt.

I begin by telling God what I actually want, in the plainest words I own. He has been listening to me for many years and has never once been impressed by my vocabulary, so I have stopped auditioning. If the desire is money, I say money, and I name the amount. If it is a diagnosis, I say the word the doctor used. If the desire embarrasses me, I say that too, which turns out to be a prayer in itself. Our Father knows what we need before we ask Him, so the naming is for my sake. It brings the desire up out of the cellar where it has been governing me in the dark and sets it on the table between us, where Someone with kinder eyes than mine can look at it.

Then I ask for the thing boldly, in Jesus' name, without hedging, the way a child asks for bread, and only when the asking is finished do I open my hands and surrender the outcome. I ask that whatever the outcome, it will glorify His name and serve His kingdom. Then I tell Him, some days through my teeth, that I will accept His will as the best, without asking Him a single question, even when it is not what I want, is not in my favor, and makes no sense to me. The order matters. Surrender offered before the asking is usually a disguise, a way of protecting myself from refusal by never quite wanting anything out loud. Asking without surrender curdles into a demand, and I start keeping accounts against God. Bold first, then handed over, and I keep that order on purpose, because left to itself my heart will skip whichever half costs more that day.

I pray at fixed hours, morning and evening, and at midday when the day makes room for it. The pattern is not mine; it comes from an old psalm:

Evening and morning and at noon I will pray, and cry aloud, And He shall hear my voice. (Psalm 55:17 NKJV)

Daniel kept the same kind of rhythm in a foreign capital, under a law written to kill him for it: he "knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days" (Daniel 6:10). The custom was older than the crisis, and it carried him on a day when courage alone might have failed.

The set times are riverbanks, and the river taught me to keep them. For years I resisted anything so regular, afraid a schedule would turn my prayers into machinery. Then I saw that a river without banks does not become more alive; it spreads thin, slows, stands, and dissipates into a swamp. Structure is not the enemy of prayer, but the condition of its endurance. The banks look like a constraint, and they are what let the current gather force and cut deep. My set hours settle a question my moods were never fit to decide. Left to themselves, my moods recycle the same interior weather, the same three worries and two wants, and would let me in to pray about three times a month. So I go at the hour, feeling everything or feeling nothing, because God is worthy of address whether or not I feel inspired, and I have found Him worth addressing either way.

Within that rhythm I say the same short prayers over and over, and I have stopped apologizing for it. Yes, I know the warning about "vain repetitions" (Matthew 6:7), and I have made my peace with it. Our Lord did not rebuke repetitive prayer there; He rebuked vain repetition, the babble of the heathen, words heaped up before idols that could hear nothing, in the hope that enough noise might finally hit the jackpot and wake some lazy deity. That kind of praying is not built on faith, but on worry, the dread that nobody is listening. A short, honest prayer said every day to a Father who already knows is another thing entirely. No one accuses a couple married forty years of vain repetition for saying the same good morning across the same table; the words have gone deeper with every saying. Some mornings my whole prayer for a person is one sentence I have prayed a thousand times, and the thousand times are why it now holds everything.

My own body has opinions about prayer, and I have stopped fighting all of them. Sitting still to pray makes me sleepy, so I often turn the prayer into a walking prayer and take it through the neighborhood, telling God whatever is in my heart while my legs keep me awake. And the simplest prayer I know needs no set hour and no quiet room: "Jesus, I love You." I pray it while washing dishes and while putting on my socks. Mean it every time, say it often, and it will go wherever the day takes you.

Some requests are too heavy to travel that lightly. When my grip tightens around one, I hand it over and deliberately rest from it. It sounds like neglect until you have tried it. I say something like this:

Lord, You have heard this one many times, and I have presented it to You. I am going to leave it with You for a while and stop bringing it up, so that my heart does not become obsessed with the outcome, or a servant of the result I hope for.

Then I go days, sometimes weeks, without raising it, the way you leave a letter with a carrier you trust and do not run down the road after the truck. When I take it up again, I usually want the thing a little less desperately and trust God a little more, and that shift is the whole reason for the resting.

Much of praying is rightly solitary, and yet I refuse to pray alone for weeks at a stretch. Tell one trusted friend the prayer you are carrying, and ask them to carry it with you. Jesus fixed a promise to the smallest gathering there is: "where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). There is an arithmetic in this I cannot explain, only report: a prayer spoken aloud beside another person weighs less on the one carrying it. The request has changed in no way at all, and yet you both walk out lighter.

Alone or shared, every prayer I pray ends inside the words Jesus gave us, "Your will be done" (Matthew 6:10), and I am careful how I say them. For years I attached them in advance, like a waiver, so that no refusal could ever be measured against my hopes; if you never quite ask, you can never quite be turned down, and I called that surrender when it was actually insurance. Said honestly, the words come after the asking, with the request still warm on the table. They hand the outcome, the timing, and the interpretation to a Father I have slowly come to trust above my own list, whose will includes things He allows that I will never understand in this life. Faith, I have learned, is total reliance on the living God. The one hope worth carrying into prayer is God Himself, and not my prayer granted the way I want it. When I have clung to what I wanted God to do more than to God Himself, I have wanted something other than God, and I have slowly stopped calling that prayer. I no longer require prayer to explain Him before I obey Him.

So, tomorrow morning. You brought a prayer into this book, and neither God nor I have forgotten it. Take it to Him early, before the day starts arguing with you. Say it in kitchen words. Ask for the whole of it, boldly, and then open your hands. Come back at evening, and the next morning, and let the banks hold you on the days when the current runs low. Somewhere along that road, at an hour neither of us can predict, you will look up from the asking and find that you were never alone with it. He shall hear your voice.