Spiritual Survival Guide
6: Keeping It Going: Moving Beyond Survival Mode
like an amazing list of answered prayers. Even if you’re not the type of person to keep an actual journal, you might want to try keeping a list of blessings. Writing them down can help you notice the small blessings that come your way every day. You might be surprised how long the list can become when you’re tuned in to God’s goodness. 4. Stretch yourself. It’s easy to fall into lazy prayer patterns. We find something that seems to be authentic and works for a while, but over time we can find our prayer life becoming stale or repetitive. When that happens (and it happens to the best of us), trying stretching yourself. You can start expanding your vision of what prayer can look like by exploring the different prayers found in the Bible. For example, we read that there are around 650 prayers in the Bible. That’s a lot of different prayers! So, when you read the Bible, be on the lookout for them. When you come across one, see if you can make it part of your own prayer time. You might be surprised how often you can. Or try reading through the book of Psalms, which is itself a book of prayers. Stretch yourself by making some of those prayers your own. You might want to try meditating on simple, one-sentence prayers like the fifteen-hundred-year-old Jesus Prayer ( Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner ). Try thinking carefully about a couple of words at a time. If you normally pray by using memorized prayers, try praying from the heart. If you normally pray off the top of your head, you might find that using a more formal, written-out prayer guide for a month will recharge your prayer life. If you tend to be a chatterbox when you pray, consider just “hanging out” with God sometimes, without words. Just show up and say, “God, I’m just going to spend the next ten minutes here with you.” Just like hanging out with a good friend, silence can be okay sometimes.
You might want to shake things up by praying in ever-widening circles and then in ever-narrowing circles. For example, one day you could begin by praying for yourself, then for your celly, then for your tier, then for your cell block, then for your prison, then for your city (your friends and loved ones), and then for the wider world. The next day, you could reverse the process and begin by praying for what’s happening in the world and slowly work your way back to yourself. Or try the circles of praying for yourself, your loved ones, and then your enemies. Jesus taught and com- manded us to pray for those who persecute us, and there’s hardly anything that’ll stretch us and grow our faith more than that. Remember, the point isn’t to just bounce around trying anything and everything. The point is to find ways that can keep the lines of commu- nication between you and God fresh, honest, and meaningful. 5. Aim for balance. If prayer is all about our communicating with God, then it’s good to check ourselves from time to time to see if we seem to be fixated on just one thing. A healthy relationship with God includes four essential things: giving thanks, asking for help, seeking forgiveness, and praising him for who he is. Sometimes, when things are difficult, we’ll go through a phase where all we seem to do is to ask for help. Or maybe we’ll be struggling with past guilt and need to keep asking God for forgiveness for a while. That’s normal and healthy. But if that’s all we do for an extended period, we can miss out on a full- er relationship with God. Over time it’s important to bring balance to how we talk to God. The very act of giving him praise or saying thank you can lift our spirits, help us to see God in a more balanced way, and bring us a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction. Think about how you normally pray. Is your prayer life lopsided? Are you always asking, but rarely saying thanks? Are you saying thank you, but never saying I’m sorry? Do you tend to say, “God, you’re great” but fail to say, “God,
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