I mentioned in my previous post that I had a new 100-day challenge in mind. This is it: ’100 days to pray’. My goal is to make an effort to increase the amount of time I spend praying, and the depth or intensity of my prayers, over the next 100 days.
The time goal is fairly modest — I’m aiming to spend 30 minutes each day praying, not necessarily all in one session. This might seem like hardly anything, but it is more than I currently do and I want to actually achieve it soon and then maintain it for most of the 100 days rather than aim for spending hours in prayer and never actually meeting the goal. It is the other part of the challenge which has me most excited.
Over the next 100 days I am going to make a particular effort to focus on prayer, learning more about it, paying attention to what the Bible has to say about prayer, and reading some books about prayer. My hope is that by making an intentional goal of maintaining this focus in my thoughts, my understanding of what prayer is and how it ‘works’ will deepen and this in turn will help my motivation to pray. I suspect that the true nature of prayer is more simple, more deep, and much more humble than I currently see it to be.
This challenge will require more active effort from me than the iPod free one — to meet that challenge all I actually had to do was leave something out of my thoughts, this time I am intentionally choosing to add something to my thoughts and musings each day, plus the commitment to actively pray also! I commend this challenge to all Christians, nobody I know is satisfied that they pray enough, so feel free to join me in this challenge and make comments on the blog posts as we learn together.
