Focus: Prayer (3/7)
Day: 11/95
Pathway summary: Being faith-filled, fervent, continual, and heartfelt in my expressions, petitions, and supplications to God.
Justification: (2 Timothy 1:3; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Matthew 6:5-13; Mark 9:23)
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Setup:
What does "praying without ceasing look like"?
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Prep:
Towards the end of really drawing out what Christ might have for me here, I looked up 1 Thessalonians 5:17 (Pray without ceasing) and checked the Concordance regarding its components.
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Execution:
I started off digging into the scripture - and was halfway through looking at the Concordance when I realized I hadn't prayed .... I wanted to really dig in so quickly that I forgot to use the very tool I was researching. So I prayed (and apologized) and this post is the result.
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Day 11 Conclusions / Thoughts
The first pass of the verse suggests either clarity or the near absence of details. "Pray without ceasing". Taking the liberty of looking at the original scripture is nearly absent of supplemental details. Prayer is defined in a standard manner; "without ceasing" too has a very clear characterization. Thus, this is either a colloquialism or there is something implicit to one of the three words that actual hearers of the original language would have known - and that was so obvious that they didn't bother to include it.
Scripture doesn't provide for any examples of non-verbal prayers ... but if we loosen up the word "prayer" to actually reflect a few other details, I think it clears things up. First, the act of prayer is an artifact of having the correct motive, attitude, and focus - a properly aligned walk will result in prayer being the correct response to every situation. Thus, this is akin to rewriting this as "pray in response to all circumstances without ceasing". This is similar to the guidance to "in everything give thanks." The execution of this observations is that we're almost perpetually on the look-out for reasons to give glory to God - otherwise you'd miss the small, subtle opportunities to be thankful. And missing those opportunities would necessarily result in missing some of the less obvious (but much more devastating or horrific) events for which most of us respond with fear, surprise, anger, or whatever - instead we ought to be responding with prayer ... which we'd do if we were habitually responding to EVERYTHING with prayer.
Another aspect of praying without ceasing must take into consideration that we are not individual nodes intended to work as mindless cogs within an orderly machine. We are beautiful butterflies in the sensitive-dependent-upon-initial-conditions chaos theory machine that provides for the ordered macro universe while simultaneously providing for what appears to be directly-contradicted rule-sets for the micro/quantum universe. And we are beautiful butterflies who are designed to work with other beautiful butterflies - which creates beautiful dependencies, and requires an intimate relationship between two or more butterflies to effectually function.
All of this to draw attention to our need for relationships - and the implicit idea that "praying without ceasing" can partly be expressed through sharing our prayer needs with others so we can ensure our needs are being prayed for while we spiritually recharge. It is easy to use these sorts of verses as an argument to never feel adequate to our role as Christ-like; however, if you simply remember that God intended you to help others, to act in love and be support for your spiritual peers, you'd recall that each of us ought to trust there are others who can pray with you - and who need us to pray with them.
May you pray without ceasing - and remember it is a deeply beautiful thing to be a part of.
