Reflection 11 - the one about prayer and online shopping

On Sunday Graham was looking at Daniel’s prayer from Daniel 9. It is good to listen in on people like Daniel as they pray as we can learn so much from them. If you’ve not had a chance to listen yet you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/Pu82R7FIqhs 

I don’t know about you, but I can very easily get frustrated and impatient when things don’t happen right away. That can be especially true with my computer. I turn it on and I expect it to be ready to go within a few seconds. But sometimes it won’t connect to the internet, or a web page will take about 3 seconds to load.

With online shopping you do have to be a little more patient – you don’t expect to order something and have it right there (unless it’s a digital download or a Kindle book, of course). But you certainly don’t expect it to take any longer than a day. If I order it today, I expect to have it by tomorrow.

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. I remember when cereal packets used to have special offers – and my sisters and I would argue about whose turn it was this time for the free gift. But first of all, we’d have to spend weeks collecting enough tokens from the special packets. And then we’d send them off with the form in the post – and then weeks later the bowl, spoon, badge or book or whatever it was would turn up in the post.

This expectation – see, click, get – can very easily carry over into our prayer life. 

On Sunday, Graham highlighted that we need to be serious and passionate in our prayers and mean what we say. I’m assuming that the prayer we have recorded here in verses 4-19 is a summary of a much longer period of prayer given that it was accompanied with fasting and the wearing of sackcloth and ashes.

There is certainly a time and place for, what are sometimes called, ‘arrow prayers’. Quick, short prayers, fired off in a moment. That time someone shares some personal news with us, or asks us for advice – “Lord, give me wisdom to say the right thing. Amen.”

But we need to make sure that there is more to our prayer life than this. We know Daniel’s habit was to go to his room and pray three times a day. There were also times when he spent longer periods in prayer and fasting. What prayer habits do you have? What prayer habits would you like to develop?