A Praying Life: Prayer is Weird.

I've always had a hard time with prayer, haven't you?  Er, maybe I'm the only one.  Frankly, I'm a terrible pray-er for all kinds of reasons.  It takes time, some major concentration, and lots of faith...three things I too often lack. 

For the past few weeks, I've been reading a book called A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller.  It's really been changing the way I think and feel and do prayer, and it has been very refreshing to my soul.

And so, I'm going to start a little blog series about prayer and what I'm learning through this awesome book.  And I hope it refreshes your soul too.   

First off, I find prayer really unnatural and weird sometimes.  Am I really doing anything when I pray?  How do you pray anyway?  I know lots of tips and tricks but they always feel weird and even contrived.  Shouldn't I be doing something more productive like studying the Bible - or even the laundry?  Miller speaks about my biggest two issues with prayer right from the get-go, in Chapter 1:

Distractions and Feeling Like I'm Not Doing Anything!
The most common frustration is the activity of praying itself.  We last for about 15 seconds, and then out of nowhere the day's to-do list pops up and our minds are off on a tangent.  We catch ourselves and, by sheer force of the will, go back to praying.  Before we know it, it has happened again.  Instead of praying, we are doing a confused mix of wandering and worrying.  Then the guilt sets in.  "Something must be wrong with me.  Other Christians don't seem to have this trouble praying."  After five minutes we give up, saying "I am no good at this.  I might as well get something done."

What Makes for a Good Prayer?
Complicating this is the enormous confusion about what makes for good prayer.  We vaguely sense that we should begin by focusing on God, not on ourselves.  So when we start to pray, we try to worship.  That works for a minute, but feels contrived; then the guilt sets in again.  We wonder, "Did I worship enough? Did I really mean it?" 

I get distracted by life and, as weird as it sounds, distracted by the act of praying itself... distracted because I'm trying to do it right.  Miller has so many good things to say in response to these distractions, and I'll talk about them more later on in this little series on prayer.  But this next quote really pulled the rug out from underneath me and shifted my paradigm like crazy:

A praying life [should feel] like our family mealtimes because prayer is all about relationship....[at a meal with family], we don't think about communication or words but about whom we are talking with... Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.... In prayer, focusing on the conversation [rather than who you are talking to] is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it.  It freezes us, making us unsure of where to go.

Dang.  

Do you guys experience this or am I the only one?