I get this question all the time, “what’s that all about praying continually”? Well… actually I don’t.  I don’t get any questions… but let us play like I do because it’s fun and I like to make-believe. 

Paul exhorts us to pray continuously… and I actually tried it in a very literal sense once when I was younger. I tried to pray non-stop every breath. It was like brushing my teeth continuously and only lasted a few hours.  But what does it mean to pray continuously? Honestly I don’t know. The end. See you next week J

I’m not a theologian or a teacher, I write these blogs more for myself than others. But there was a time in my life where I think I experienced this praying continuously, and the odd part is, in the traditional sense, I didn’t utter prayers at all. It was without a doubt the most wonderful time of my existence. And I wish I knew what it was that made it so. Like I joke about often, I wish there were a book titled “Seven keys to praying continuously and having a spiritual awakening while washing the dishes or trimming trees.” Shew..

But of course my book only has one step. Why complicate things? The one step is listening. Being still and knowing he is God while your patching your roof or cleaning the hair out of the shower drain. I don’t think a life of continues prayer is something that will-power is going to help with. In fact, in spiritual practices, will-power only seems to muddy the waters for me.

Instead, praying continually is less uttering words and thoughts, but a state of listening. A man I much admire, Peter Kreeft, once said: “if your talking to a child you do most the talking - if talking to a peer, you do maybe half the talking, an elder, probably not much talking…  so how much do you talk when with the Creator of the Universe?”

I had been talking, arguing, screaming at God for years. So much so, I don’t think I heard a word he said. When I was thoroughly broken and convinced that I didn’t know what I needed or even what to ask for, I began to pray continually just naturally. In the same way, I used to follow my father when I was three, just strutting along looking at his feet, not knowing or caring where we were going. Just following… I knew he wouldn’t take me anywhere I wasn’t supposed to be.