Build Consistency through Shorter Times of Prayer
Even though my times with the Lord were short, I was able to do them quite consistently because of the simplicity of the strategy.
I write a lot about the benefits of having lengthy times of prayer with God. However, some of you may be wondering: is there a place for shorter times of prayer too? I believe there is.
Years ago, I was really struggling with connecting with the Lord through spiritual practices. I enacted a very simple strategy out of desperation to get my spiritual life back together. I decided not to push myself too hard and just go as simple as I could. I settled on spending just a few minutes each day in simple prayer and a little bit of reading from the Bible. During that particular year, this usually meant that I prayed for just about 5-10 minutes and I read the Bible for another 5-10 minutes (usually not more than one passage or half a chapter). If I felt like it, I would add a little bit of reflection and journaling. That was it. All in all, it took me just about 10-20 minutes a day to complete my time with the Lord. On occasion, I may have even spent less time in prayer due to negligence or laziness on my part. I would often repeat this motto to myself to inspire me to keep going: "Some is better than none." A little bit of prayer and Bible reading was certainly better than none at all. I had to learn to avoid having an all-or-nothing mentality, which was an easy tendency to have when it came to my spiritual life.
Obviously, these short times with the Lord didn't go very deep. At times, I felt like I was just rushing through the spiritual activity or I felt like I was simply checking off an item on my list of things to do for the day. And of course, in hindsight, I realize now that I probably didn't grow as much as I could have. However, the simple and short times of prayer served a really important purpose during that season: it taught me consistency. Even though my times with the Lord were short, I was able to do them quite consistently because of the simplicity of the strategy. And even on days when I felt particularly lazy, I would simply give myself permission to shorten the practice even more. The point of the strategy was to build some form of consistency in doing my spiritual exercises.
That consistency set some of the groundwork for what my current times with the Lord look like today. With the much needed consistency in hand, I was then able to develop my prayer life further and morph it into something deeper. But I had to have that consistency in the first place. If you don't have consistency to begin with, you're likely going to struggle to develop the practice into something more substantial later on.
A word of caution, however, is needed: once you have the consistency, it's easy to just stay at that level of spiritual depth and not develop your spiritual practices any further. Don't stop growing. Take the foundation of consistency that you've built up and run with it. Greater spiritual benefits come with greater intimacy and depth of relationship with our Lord and Savior. The simple and short times of prayer are just there to help you get started. But don't end there or you'll miss out on what the Lord has in store for you that only comes through deeper times with Him.
Barnabas the Monastic
Servant of Christ. Husband. Dad. Modern Monastic. I have a wild ambition in life: get as close to the Lord Jesus Christ as I can while on earth. I explore and integrate ancient Christian monk wisdom in modern everyday life. Lives in Canada.
