Multi-Layered Prayer

So my walking buddy is out of town, all week except Sundays, for the next three weeks. This is rather risky for my health plan.

But so far, I've been doing okay. I discovered a month ago or so that the walking track can be a good place to pray. Sometimes I give each lap over to praying for a different person.

But yesterday, I tried something else. And discovered some interesting things about the way my brain works in prayer.

There is a three-line prayer that I use sometimes that comes from one of my favorite books, "The Scent of Water" by Elizabeth Goudge. It goes, "Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands."

I use this prayer sometimes with beads. On each bead, I will inhale as a preparation breath, exhale with "Lord, have mercy", inhale with "Thee I adore", and then exhale with "Into Thy hands."

I decided to try this prayer when I was walking yesterday. But I was clearly breathing too fast to use it the way I do it with the beads. So instead, I gave each side of the track a different line, including the silent preparation section to make four. And I repeated each line over and over, in rhythm with my steps, along each side of the track. It helps that they each have four syllables.

It worked well, but what I discovered is that with such simple, repetitive lines, my brain needed more to keep focused. So instead of simply thinking about the words I was saying in my brain, I was visualizing what I meant by them on each lap. I spent some time focusing the prayer on my church and my ministry. And some laps were focused on the state of the world, refugees, people living under oppression, etc. And some laps were focused on my family.

It was like music. There was a melody line, the repeated lines, that grounded the prayer. And then there were the more wandering harmonies that made more explicit what it was I was putting before God. It was a very satisfying prayer experience, which I think means, for me, that I was able to stay pretty darn focused for the whole 45 minutes. My only trip-ups were when I stopped to congratulate myself on my pace. Shocking that self-congratulation would be a distraction from prayer, eh?

I think there are probably many people who need prayer to be happening at multiple levels at once in order to hold their attention. Luther said that "those who sing, pray twice." Perhaps those who exercise and pray do as well.