TO LEARN HOW TO PRAY IS TO KNOW HOW TO LIVE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 93, 10 September 1948, Page 7

TO LEARN HOW TO PRAY IS TO KNOW HOW TO LIVE

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) It is absolutely essential to spend some time every morning in prayer. That appointment must be kept sacredly, and jealously guarded. No excuse is good enough to forego the quiet time. Don’t think you will be able to find time later on_,in the day. That other time never arrives. Our relationship to God is personal, not mechanical. Prayer is a personal contact. The deepest, surest fact, about prayer is that we find God, know God, learn to be at home with Him, and live with Him. To learn how to pray is to learn how to live. Prayer remakes and revitalises lives and renews jaded spirits. The only real failure in prayer is to give up trying. Never begin to pray until you have spent a short time reminding yourself that you are in God’s presence, and realising that He is listening to you. Gratitude, the counting of our blessings, keeps the grace of wonder alive in us. If in everything we give thanks, we . cultivate the habit of seeing and finding God’s mercy upon the common roads of life. Don’t worry if your thoughts wander in prayer—so do everybody’s. Busy things of the day come surging in. Never mind, just pause, and take up your supplication and go on. Unless we fix times for prayer, we shall end by having no time at all. We don’t murder the • finest things in life, we just let them die by neglect. Begin at the beginning. Use the minutes between the time of waking and getting out of bed. Let your mind take hold of the fact that you are not going out into the day alone. You are not an orphan; You have a Father. Dr. W. H. Fitchett found that he could -pray best as he walked, and he could be seen every morning, at seven o’clock, walking about the heights of Hawthorn, wrapt in communion with God. In the “Life of Bishop Moule” Canon Sillingston recalls among early impressions at Ridley Hall, “the sight of Mr Moule walking in his garden every morning from 7 to 7.30 at prayer.”' The silence of nature helped him in his devotions, and he found he could pray best as he walked. He also found it an aid to meditation to speak aloud to God in prayer. If it is your good fortune to know some sequestered path beneath the trees, you may share your morning prayer or evening praise with the singing birds in the branches.