Hey, if your prayers are boring you, how do you think the Almighty feels?
In the introduction to his book on prayer, “Invading the Privacy of God,” Cecil Murphey begins, “Prayer bores me and I sometimes wonder why I’m doing it.”
“There! I said it in print,” he continues.
For years Murphey admits he has vacillated between excitement and boredom in his prayer life. He writes, “I’ve read dozens (literally!) of books on the subject; learned four different methods for praying the Lord’s Prayer; embraced techniques for praying the Psalms; recited the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner’) for nearly an hour at a time; taken lessons on meditation techniques; praised my way out of despair; sung hymns of petition; and like a lot of others, I’ve used the Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication (ACTS) method of prayer.”
And did all that work for him? “Yes — sometimes and for a while.”
At the best of times, Murphey has “felt such a closeness to Jesus Christ that it seemed I could actually feel a hand wrap itself around mine.” And at other times, “I’ve fallen asleep on my knees, or I’ve prayed for four minutes that felt like two hours.”
At first, he confesses, he rebuked himself for being bored during prayer. He chided himself to “get past the boredom, press on!”
The best solution he has found to the problem of being bored while praying was to use different methods in his prayers. After all, Murphey says, “there is no one method of prayer. We can approach God in many ways.”
I agree completely.
The times when I’ve felt bored while praying, I have confessed what seems so elementary as to be silly: it’s my problem and not God’s. I mean, imagine walking into the control-central of Heaven where the Ruler of the Universe sits enthroned — and being bored. (Okay, I can imagine some teenagers pulling it off. But we’re talking about normal people.)
The problem is mine.