{"id":324,"date":"2008-10-20T06:06:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-20T06:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/10\/how-do-you-pray.html"},"modified":"2008-10-20T06:06:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-20T06:06:00","slug":"how-do-you-pray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/10\/how-do-you-pray.html","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Pray?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ve been thinking a lot<\/span> about prayer lately, mainly because I just finished writing a chapter about prayer in my “doubt” manuscript for Zondervan.<\/p>\n

Mainly it’s about my problems with prayer — including:<\/p>\n

1. <\/span>How I don’t understand it<\/span> very well (but am learning to re-understand it)<\/p>\n

2. <\/span>How my attitude about it is wrong<\/span> because I get increasingly annoyed by the way I pray in public (mainly worrying about what people think about my prayer)<\/p>\n

<\/span>3. How I also get annoyed<\/span> by the way other<\/span> people pray in public (mainly worrying about how many times they say the fake humble word “just” — too many — and how often they use some variant of Father, Lord, God, LordGod,<\/span> or FatherGod<\/span> in place of commas and periods, as if we need to keep calling God by name every few phrases to make sure we keep his attention)<\/p>\n

4.<\/span> How my tendency to judge<\/span> other people’s prayers pretty much makes me a horrible person.<\/p>\n

The chapter explains how rarely I pray these days using the good-old Southern Baptist, conversational, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to prayer. Instead, when I do pray — which, admittedly, isn’t often enough — I find myself relying on selections from the Book of Common Prayer<\/a> or to the Lord’s Prayer or to other prayers from scripture.<\/p>\n

But mainly I return, all the time, to two sentence-long prayers that are easy to remember, are almost always truthful, and are almost always appropriate.<\/p>\n

One is known in Orthodox and contemplative circles as “The Jesus Prayer<\/a>.” There are several variations of it, but the one I like most is:<\/p>\n

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.<\/span><\/div>\n

The other is one I learned from my parents and teachers over the years, who just wanted me to be polite but ended up teaching me the importance of gratitude. That prayer is this:<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/span><\/div>\n

———–<\/p>\n

That’s my confession. How do you pray?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, mainly because I just finished writing a chapter about prayer in my “doubt” manuscript for Zondervan. Mainly it’s about my problems with prayer — including: 1. How I don’t understand it very well (but am learning to re-understand it) 2. How my attitude about it is wrong…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-questions","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Do You Pray? - O Me of Little Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2008\/10\/how-do-you-pray.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Do You Pray? - O Me of Little Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, mainly because I just finished writing a chapter about prayer in my “doubt” manuscript for Zondervan. 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