I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to be a little bold and prophesy over you. I know we may not have met, but that is not important right now.
Forgive my frankness.
The thing is, I believe that you are currently struggling in your prayer life. Sometimes you enjoy praying, but it’s rare. Most of the time you feel a bit of a spiritual failure. You compare yourself to other people and everyone else looks and sounds more prayerful than you.

You set yourself goals to try harder or even dip into a few books on ‘quiet times’, but nothing really lasts. You pray ‘well’ for three days straight. (I’m defining ‘well’ by your feelings about the experience, not by how long it was before you got bored, thought about what was for lunch, or mentally wrote a list of people you owe a fiver to.)

Day four arrives and you don’t get up on time and… BANG!… you feel you are back at square zero….Or slightly behind that.

We all have days, months or even years when God feels silent, passive or unreachable. We just try to hide that from others. Don’t we?

When I was a teacher I mastered the art of double-edged report writing. I would write, ‘Luke shows real determination in class’ which actually meant, ‘Luke is totally unbiddable and I can’t do a thing with him!’ In the same way we have also learnt to disguise our lack of holiness with ‘Christianisms’ like,
‘I sometimes struggle to read my Bible’ which translates as, ‘If my Bible was stolen, I wouldn’t notice for about 10 months.’ Or, ‘Praying is hard at the moment’ which could be read as ‘I don’t actually bother talking to God any more.’

I speak to alot of people about their spiritual lives. It’s one of the things that interests me the most, and not because I have my own life ‘sorted’. Far from it. I just believe that being honest about how we fail, is ‘step one’ on the road to true spirituality.

So I was so heartened when I discovered the ‘Devotional Rescue’ series. The first book I read was properly scary. Almost every page of ‘It’s time to leave the cemetery’ was relevant to my life. I had a problem in putting it down. I started to copy out salient points into my prayer journal, but stopped when I realised I was actually just scribing the entire text. It was nothing sort of prophetic perfume, the smell of which lasted throughout the day. It helped to reprogramme me to think differently about my circumstances and to pray more holistically.

My copy of the book was returned recently. I’d lent it to friends. I’m in a different season altogether, so expected that when I re-read passages from it, it would no longer speak quite so loudly.

How wrong can a girl be?

(There are four books in the Devotional Rescue series, edited by Dave Gilpin, published by Integrity Media Europe. Go to worshipwithintegrity.com)