“A kitchen timer changed my prayer life for the better!”
Dave Gibson
Today is the National Day of Prayer and I want to take this opportunity to tell you how a kitchen timer changed my prayer life.
Consider two different kinds of prayer—the first is the little, ongoing, “arrow” prayers that we shoot up at intervals throughout the day and the second is the times of prolonged prayer when the focus is on extended communication with God.
This first kind of prayer, the throughout the day “arrow” kind of prayers, is commanded in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 where it says, “Pray without ceasing.” That seems like a tall order and it is but it is also much misunderstood by the average reader. The verse is not a command to sit down and pray all day long every day. The command is not to do nothing else but pray. It is rather a command to pray repeatedly throughout the day—letting every little event or thought or sight be a catalyst for a short, immediate, intermittent prayer.
The verb used in the command to pray in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 is called an “iterative” verb. The word iterative means “an activity that is practiced repeatedly”—like the action of a hacking cough. When you have a hacking cough you do not give out one long, uninterrupted cough all day long. Rather, you cough and then you cough again, and then again, and then again—with the briefest of intervals between coughs. This is an iterative action. The act of coughing is repeated at short intervals throughout the day.
That sort of “hacking cough action” is what is involved in the “pray without ceasing” command. It is the action of praying at small intervals repeatedly throughout your waking hours. It is the repeated action of prayer. When we are good at “iterative” prayer every little stimulus throughout the day becomes a stimulus to pray. So for example: I hear a fire siren and pray for safety for whatever is going on. I see a man walking down the street and pray for his salvation. I get an email from my son and pray for his needs. I see that I missed a call from a friend and pray for a problem he has. I hear my neighbor’s dog bark and pray for my neighbor. I remember a sad event and pray for God to bring healing to everyone involved. This is iterative prayer—the Bible’s command to pray without ceasing.
Truthfully, I am doing better and better at iterative prayer. Where I fall down miserably is in the “extended, dedicated, focus on God and just pray” kind of prayer. I, as a classic Type A kind of person, have (sinfully and insanely) just been too busy to set aside time for this kind of prayer. Or, to say it more accurately, I have believed that I could save the world without any help from God so I just get up and tackle my list of items that are designed to save the world and trust that God will bless what I am up to. (Another Messiah Complex in action.)
Another complicating factor, beyond the insane belief that I am too busy to pray, is the fact that when I do sit down to just pray I don’t focus very well. I pray for just a minute and then I am off thinking about something else and then I come back to prayer and I look at my watch to see how long I have been praying and then I pray and then I wander off down a bunny trial and then I come back to pray and then I wonder how long I should pray and then I… Prayer for me, as for most believers is a struggle, probably often following the pattern I just spelled out. I got some profound help with this problem with a very simple thing.
Kathi and I are reading a book together entitled Prayer by Phillip Yancy. (It is an outstanding book and well worth the read.) In one of his chapters he was talking about the problem of faithfulness in longer times of prayer and mentioned that he uses a kitchen timer to set the length of his prayer time. Yancy picks out a consistent time each day, sets a kitchen timer for how long he intends to pray, and begins praying. In this way he knows that the timer will sound when the prayer time is over and he does not keep looking at his watch to see how long he has prayed and does not keep looking at his watch wondering how much longer he should pray.
I have been using this simple technique and it has worked wonderfully for me. I set the timer, take off my watch so that I will not check it at all, and so have been very free to just focus on conversation with God. I have felt a terrific freedom to pray and be very free from the questions of how much time has passed or if it is time for me to stop and get on to something else.
The simple application for today: buy a kitchen timer, set it for 30 minutes, take off your watch, and have a conversation with our Father. And as the doctor says on most prescriptions, “Repeat daily.”
