Helps on Morning Prayer (Paul Miller)

I am currently reading Paul E. Miller’s book, “A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World”. Wow. I am hooked. Extremely practical teaching on prayer. Deeply Biblical. And my favorite – short chapters! It’s also very comfortable to hold. I’m convinced that when a book is attractive to the eye and comfortable in the hands, people will be more apt to finishing it. That may actually be an epidemic in our day – unfinished books. Just kidding.

Anyway, I loved his list of helps on ‘praying in the morning’. No, you don’t HAVE to pray in the morning, but I believe it is essential to a God-centered day. Here we go:

• Get to bed – what you do in the evening will shape your morning. The Hebrew notion of a day as the evening and morning helps you plan for prayer. If you want to pray in the morning, then plan your evening so you don’t stay up too late. The evening and the morning are connected.
• Get up – praying in bed is wonderful. In fact, the more you pray out of bed, the more you’ll pray in bed. But you’ll never develop a morning prayer time in bed. Some of my richest prayer times are at night. I’ll wake up praying. But those prayer times only began to emerge because I got out of bed to pray.
• Get awake – Maybe you need to make a pot of coffee first or take a shower.
• Get a quiet place – Maybe a room, a chair, or a place with a view. Or maybe you do better going for a walk. Make sure that no one can interrupt you.
• Get comfortable – Don’t feel like you have to pray on your knees. For years I was hindered from praying because I found it so uncomfortable to pray on my knees.
• Get going – start with just five minutes. Start with a small goal that you can attain rather than something heroic. You’ll quickly find that the time will fly.
• Keep going – consistency is more important than length. If you pray five minutes every day, then the length of time will slowly grow. You’ll enjoy being with God.