Constant prayer

Way back in July, I went to a thing called Time For Youth. I've already told you one story about this in The simple joy of kindred spirits. In the afternoon, there were a series of workshops and you had to sign up for three of them, and one of the ones that I signed up for was about how to be a Christian in every day life, and how living as a Christian is different than not living as a Christian. One of the things that was mentioned was constant prayer.

At first, I didn't think it was possible. How can you be praying constantly? But recently I've been thinking, how can you not be constantly praying? I thought of the hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus, and about how Jesus is our friend. I began thinking about Jesus' omnipresence, and about how we never are without Jesus right next to us.

Therefore, if Jesus is our friend and He's always right beside us, shouldn't we always be talking to Him? Even if it's about the really mundane things like what we had for breakfast or the fact that our shoelaces are untied. Because, after all, if your best friend was sitting next to you, you wouldn't ignore them. So why, when our ultimate best friend is right beside us wherever we go, we don't talk to Him all the time?

Another obstacle is, what would you talk about? I think the problem is that it is seen that the only thing that you can pray about are the things that you're 'supposed' to pray about; things like war and injustice and the like. But, again, we have to remember that Jesus is our ultimate best friend.

I once read a Bible plan that talked about how Abraham is described in Genesis as being God's friend. We can see this when God is planning to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He says to Himself that He is not going to hide His plans from Abraham (Genesis 18:17). So that's what you do with a friend: you tell them your plans, as well as the stuff that isn't really important.

Therefore, if Jesus is our ultimate best friend, we should tell Him all of our plans and the stuff that isn't really important. For that reason, I think that constant prayer is possible. We can tell Jesus that we're going to take a shortcut to school or work, and we can tell Him that the advert that's on the TV really annoys us, because Jesus is our friend, and He's right there.