Time with Your Father

Taken from A Praying Life by Paul E. Miller

Here are seven simple suggestions for how you can spend time with your Father in the morning:

* Get to bed. What you do in the evening will shape your morning. The Hebrew notion of a day as the evening and morning (see Genesis 1) helps you plan for prayer. If you want to pray in the morning, then plan your evening so you don't stay up too late. The evening and the morning are connected.

* Get up. Praying in bed is wonderful. In fact, the more you pray out of bed, the more you'll pray in bed. But you'll never develop a morning prayer in bed. Some of my richest prayer times are at night. I'll wake up praying. But those prayer times only began to emerge because I got out of bed to pray.

* Get awake. Maybe you need to make a pot of coffee first or take a shower.

* Get a quiet place. Maybe a room, a chair, or a place with a view. Or maybe you do better going for a walk. Make sure that no one can interrupt you.

* Get comfortable. Don't feel like you have to pray on your knees. For years I was hindered from praying because I found it so uncomfortable to pray on my knees.

* Get going. Start with just five minutes. Start with a small goal that you can attain rather than something heroic. You'll quickly find that the time will fly.

* Keep going. Consistency is more important than length. If you pray five minutes every day, then the length of time will slowly grow. You'll look up and discover that twenty minutes have gone by. You'll enjoy being with God. Jesus is so concerned about hanging in there with prayer that he tells "his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up" (Luke 18:1, NIV).

You may also enjoy my past series on Quiet Times.