Prayer is unnatural and often dubious, so it is difficult. We wonder if we have the right motives, if we will be heard by God, and if we have sufficient trust in our requests. We may feel cluttered with distractions of our concerns and doubts. We can feel paralyzed by the many prescriptions about prayer, such as:

  • pray with thanks and worship before making requests
  • persevere (“keep asking and knocking”) even if you don’t get a response at first
  • repetitive prayers can be vain and so God will ignore those (this warning comes to mind when I see pedestrians pushing the button for the walk signal repeatedly)
  • prayer should be unceasing
  • prayer can be conversational
  • pray biblical prayers, such as the so-called Prayer of Jabez
  • prayer gets God to change his mind
  • prayer does not change God; prayer changes me

I offer a recommendation for the difficulties of prayer despite the many confusing prescriptions about how to pray and the clutter in our consciousness as we attempt to pray. When we turn to prayer, we are often distracted, and we have trouble forming prayers that are genuine and relational instead of being religious and done as a work—perhaps even as a formula resembling magic (for example, “If I pray the right way, then I’ll get what I want from God”).

Clutter can be faced in at least two ways. First, John Coe suggests that we make the clutter our agenda for prayer. If I am distracted by worry about my dwindling finances and my swelling stack of bills while I am trying to pray about other things, then I can pivot to make my financial concerns the thing I talk to God about right now. This approach of praying about the things that are bothering me or cluttering my consciousness can be a way of following the Spirit’s leading for what to pray about. That question of “God, what do I need to talk to you about?” can be a fruitful start in a meeting with God. This approach can help to clear the clutter so we may focus on other concerns.

Second, I recommend the use of a training device for prayer so we can talk to God while we remain engaged with daily life—even in conversations with people. This training device can become prayer itself, by which we actually talk to God, but that is not the primary function of the device. The main purpose is to experience the form of prayer as natural within and alongside normal life. We need this because we do not normally engage the supernatural in the midst of the natural. We have trouble mixing molecules and miracles, living according to both the judgments of ot