You Can Pray by Writing to God

Was cleaning up my old journal entries in my digital notebook (migrating them from Evernote to Bear). I came upon this typed-out prayer from March 4, 2012 that I wrote and typed, as a prayer, in my journal.

There’s a biblical precedence for recording prayers. It’s there in the New Testament; I think of the good one in Ephesians 3 There are prayers recorded in the Old Testament too; for that part of the Bible, I think of Nehemiah 1. (Just to be clear, I’m not writing the Bible. That was already done many years ago when the canon was completed.)

Here’s my prayer from 2012 in its entirety, with minor edits for typos and anonymizing personal info, though I kept the lower-case i, since that shows how I typed it.

To pray by writing to God

Praying out loud often feels like gibberish to me, blabbing thoughts at the top of my mind. But writing is a way of communicating, and not only to get thoughts clearer and spelled out, i can use this as a way to pray. Along with journaling.

So, God, thank you for giving me this life, i’m grateful for my dear wife and son, and how you have given me so many opportunities to connect with many people who are doing good things in your kingdom. Now as i write/type this prayer to you, i’m thinking i could type shorthand, so i don’t wind up praying so slow, because as i engage this way of praying, i find my thoughts are flowing faster than i can type.

I pray for my own pace of life, after the trip to Austin for a conference, i’m feeling tired, and also overwhelmed by how much there is to do, and, how i can hear your voice for what it is that You want me to do. 2 good questions throughout the conference — what is God saying and what am I going to do about it?

I need your strength to get my project going, to get 2 videos recorded: my own story of pain, and invite for others to share.

I thank you for all those who put together the conference, really quality content on discipleship, following Jesus, justice, grace, missions. Qualitative over quantitative.

Pray my convo w AM will bear fruit in due time, lead me on what to say, to learn of his heart and yearning, that we’d see a breakthru in the chuang extended family. Pray for my convo w ED too. I need to initiate.

That’s what it is, the harder road, to initiate when others won’t. Remembering convo w RH about same race people avoiding or ignoring us. Yes, it’s painful, but how we change them and model a different life is what we can do.

Critique doesn’t do much except to raise conflict and defensiveness, there are better ways to encourage.

[end of prayer]