“Lord, teach me to pray.”
This was my first prayer for 2025. I’m not one who typically chooses a word or theme for the year. But on December 29, when I pulled out a fresh spiral notebook and started journaling thoughts around the coming year, these five words poured immediately from my pen.
“Lord, teach me to pray.”
A strange prayer, perhaps, considering I’m a 50-something woman who has been church-ing and praying for half a century. Don’t I already know how to pray? Am I not yet proficient at it, even after all this time and practice? I can quote The Lord’s Prayer by memory as well as several Scripture-based prayers. I have the Book of Common Prayer sitting strong and stocky on my bookshelf, not far from multiple textbooks and trade books on the subject of prayer. I’ve done Bible studies on prayer, studied various practices of prayer, and utilized different tricks and techniques to boost my prayer life.
Am I not yet a master pray-er? Alas, I am not. I am a desperate, desiring, hungry prayer-wannabe. A woman who often struggles to do the one thing she needs most.
Why? Perhaps it’s because prayer is a lifelong relationship, one that ebbs and flows and changes in seasons. Besides, relationships aren’t about mastery, but about authentic, honest, and consistent connection. It’s more than that, however. I think my struggle is, at least in part, because the kind of prayer my soul needs most requires stillness. And I don’t do “still” well.
Maybe I’m yet another victim of our tech-infused, busy-addicted, attention-deficit-disordered culture. It seems ten minutes don’t pass without a buzz or a beep or a real live person needing my attention and response.
And yet, what if stillness isn’t a product of nature or instinct but the result of boundaries and discipline? I think it is. This is how the Psalmist described it:
“My heart is not proud, Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.”
Psalm 131 NIV
“I have calmed and quieted myself,” the author says (emphasis mine). Did you hear that? I have the ability to quiet myself. Yes, I can ask the Holy Spirit for help. But asking the Lord to quiet my soul while I’m scrolling my phone doesn’t solve my stillness problem. Asking the Lord to calm my anxious heart while I’m watching the news 24/7 isn’t productive.
It’s not enough to want stillness. I must do stillness. That means, like any habit or discipline, I need to take action to make it happen. To help us with this practice, I created a short heart poem from the five letters of S-T-I-L-L and pulled from the words of Psalm 131. When said in tandem with the act of breathing, it can help produce the stillness we crave:
- STAY, oh my soul,
- for a short TIME
- to INHALE God’s presence, [breathe in]
- LET GO of all worries, [breathe out]
- and LOOK toward Hope.
Be STILL, my soul. Be still.
Here’s the good news, my friends: On the other side of the discipline of stillness sits a feast of contentment for the starving soul. Our God promises to fill the cavernous void, cure our broken hearts, calm our anxiety, and quiet our chaos. And it begins with you and me choosing to sit in the Lord’s presence. To look toward His hope. And be still.
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