Nurturing Prayer

Nurturing Prayer

Be gentle toward yourself. Sometimes you will have wandering thoughts, distractions during prayer. Don't fight them or force them down. Perhaps they are signals of deep wounded areas within that will need attention... If they surface during prayer, envision yourself lifting them lovingly and putting them in to the healing hands of Jesus Christ. If they seem trivial distractions, don't use force. Smile at them as you would at a little child at play at the edges of your consciousness.

You won't always feel deep love for God or deep longing for prayer. There are seasons of the spirit just as there are seasons during the year. As with any committed friendship, there will be times when you feel much emotional concentration on the other and times when you feel blank and dry. This does not weaken or invalidate the prayer in the least. Some of the most powerful times of prayer are the times when with humor and honesty we admit to God that at the moment we feel dry, bored, not in the mood, and yet, nevertheless, we are willing to be reached and nurtured. Great miracles of opening and change within can happen in these times.

If every day, no matter what your mood, you allow the love of God to feed you deeply through some form of prayer, if only for a few minutes, amazing changes can happen in your life. God, whose name is love, offers us - with every breath we take - a new, transforming energy for our tense, stress-filled bodies and an inner healing that reaches depths we had not dreamed!


Flora Slosson Wuellner
Prayer, Stress and Our Inner Wounds, pages 24-25
1985 Upper Room, Nashville,Tennessee