I remember when Mom, before the days of cake mixes, would stir the ingredients together for a batch of delicious muffins and pop them in the oven. When they were ready she'd taste one, only to say, "Something's missing. These don't taste quite right... Oh, I forgot the vanilla!"

So it is sometimes with our prayer lives. With a vague sense of disquiet we say, "I wonder what's missing?" Perhaps what's missing is the simplest of ingredients, something God gives each of us equally every day: TIME.

If time is the missing ingredient of your prayer life, you may want to try setting aside a specific time and place to get together with God each day in prayer.

Martin Luther's barber and old friend, Peter Beskendorf, asked him for suggestions concerning prayer. Luther responded with "A Simple Way to Pray." One short paragraph in it caught my eye:

It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night. Guard yourself carefully against those false, deluding ideas which tell you, "Wait a little while. I will pray in an hour; first I must attend to this or that." Such thoughts get you away from prayer into other affairs which so hold your attention and involve you that nothing comes of prayer for that day.

Try adding TIME to your prayer life. It may be just what's missing!

P.S. When we pray, may we have the humility of Martin Luther. He wrote to his barber: "I will tell you as best I can what I do personally when I pray. May our dear Lord grant to you and to everybody to do it better than I! Amen."

Source: http://www.hope-aurora.org/docs/ASimpleWaytoPray.pdf (p. 3)

Shel Sorenson is the CLB Prayer Team Coordinator. The CLB Prayer Team is on-call to pray for requests from our family of churches. E-mail the team at: pray@prayclb.org.

By CLB Prayer Team

The CLB Prayer Team. On-call to pray for requests from our family of churches. Send prayer requests by email to pray@prayclb.org.

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E-mail: pray@prayclb.org