I want to help you find time for mighty prayer. We all have such busy lives, and we are surrounded by so many distractions. And our lives are changing so much these days. I feel like it is harder to anticipate what’s coming next. That just means we need prayer more than ever before. Finding time to pray will be a big challenge, but our Savior will help us.  Here are some things we can do.

Pray first thing in the morning. Pray right before you go to bed. Pray at mealtimes. Many Christians have been taught to do this, and it is a great place to start. It teaches us that prayer is important enough to make time for it. It helps us make a habit of praying every day. Doing it routinely, helps us to remember to check in with our Heavenly Father.

Experts say that we need time away from these devices. Etiquette still demands that we not call one another after 9:00 pm unless it is an emergency, so we don’t really need a phone after 9. All those other dings, pings and other notifications won’t need your attention until tomorrow, if they require your attention at all. After 9, a phone is just a toy that diverts our attention from the people in our lives and the other realities in our lives. The earlier you put your phone to bed the more time you will have for your family and the more time you will have for mighty prayer. You might even find time for mighty prayer WITH your family. 

Now, I realize that phones are not the only distractions from prayer in our modern world, but for most people this one little rule could free up whole hours of time every day. I know people who have gone without their devices for days or even weeks as a kind of fasting, and they report amazingly positive results, like more time with important people in their lives, less stress, improved moods, depression lifting, better sleep, and more opportunities to build a relationship with the Lord and to help and serve His children. 

You can put your phone away for a few extra hours every night. God will help you. Let God help you do hard things like this. If your phone ever does ring after 9:00 pm, answer it. It’s an emergency. Otherwise, let it rest. Then come unto Christ and let Him give you rest.

Prayer can be an ongoing conversation with our Heavenly Father. And the conversation is often open-ended on God’s end. He always leaves the lines open for communication with us. He doesn’t always answer right away, so it is important to keep listening. And listening is a big part of mighty prayer. If we are wise, we will listen more than we speak in prayer. 

Because God answers quietly, we can often hear his answers in the little quiet moments between the big noisy tasks of daily life, when we  tune our spiritual ears to hear them. This means that God’s answers don’t only come quietly, they can come quickly, and the quicker we respond to the answers we receive, the quicker we will get at catching them. The quicker we get at catching the answers, the more answers we will get out of the time we have.

So, make it a habit to respond quickly to the answers you receive from God. How long does it take to say “thank you?” Sometimes we cannot respond more than that in the moment, but we need to get back to the conversation at the earliest opportunity. Ask for clarification. Ask for further direction. Act on what you have received, especially when directed to help others. God knows the urgency of the errands He sends us on, and sometimes we don’t. 

“In all thy ways, acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.” That’s a prayerful life! 

Anytime that you might put on the headphones and plug in to your favorite music and audio books is a time you could use to have a conversation with your Father in Heaven. Jogging, commuting and washing dishes are naturally quiet and solitary times. Social media memes have convinced us that quiet and solitary time does not exist, but it does if we allow it to exist without destroying it with whatever is coming through the headphones. 

There are a few things that you might need to know about prayer to use this quiet time wisely.

• You need to know that you don’t have to kneel to pray. You can pray standing, sitting or even moving. You don’t have to drop to your knees in the middle of your commute, your jog or your household chores. Just pray.
• You need to know that you don’t have to close your eyes when you pray. Do NOT CLOSE YOUR EYES when you are driving to and from work. Just  pray. You can talk to the Lord with your eyes wide open! You can close your eyes if you commute by bus or train. You probably should not close your eyes when you are jogging. My husband was blind and he did a pretty good job washing dishes. You can close your eyes if you pray while washing dishes, but you don’t have to.
• You need to know that you don’t have to say your prayers out loud. The Lord can hear your thoughts. The Lord knows the desires of your heart. Direct your thoughts to Him in prayer. God will hear you. Nobody else needs to hear you. You can pray silently on the bus. You can pray silently while you run. You can pray out loud if you want to, especially in your own car or kitchen. Just know that you can pray silently anytime you want to. 

Ponder the things you are praying about. Every time you think about your questions and concerns, every moment you spend considering the options, every minute you spend searching for the answers is part of the process, especially when you invite the Lord to offer his input along the way. Every time you revisit the topics you prayed about, revisit the conversation with the Lord. That is time spent praying.   

I never want to miss a chance to mention this principle of prayer. It is one of my all time favorites. I found it in the bible dictionary. I love my Bible dictionary even more than the online thesaurus! Here’s the golden nugget I found: It says,

“As soon as we learn the true relationship in which we stand toward God (namely, God is our Father and we are his children), then at once prayer becomes natural and instinctive on our part. Many of the so-called difficulties about prayer arise from forgetting this relationship.”

Don’t you love that? It said that God is our Father and as long as we remember that we won’t have so many problems with prayer. 

It has been my experience that the more I know about God, the more I love Him and the more I love Him, the more I want to pray. And this can get to the point that you wouldn’t let anything get in the way of praying. It is so much easier to find time to pray when I am motivated by love of God than by a sense of duty or worse, guilt. 

I used to really struggle to find time to pray. It was hard to set aside other things. It was nearly impossible for me to wake up early for prayer. I knew I should make more time for prayer, but I wasn’t doing it, and I felt like a failure. 

This was the cure: to learn to love God. How did I do that? 

• I kept praying as much as I could. I never gave up.
• I attended church regularly.
• I read about my Savior in the scriptures.
• And I listened to friends and leaders who know the Lord and love Him. The way they love Him was, in a way, contagious.
• I was blessed by the Lord for my efforts. I could see his blessings in my life. 
• I learned that God loves me.

That’s how I learned to love the Lord.

On a scale of one to ten, how much does God value prayer? Compared to all the other things you could do today, how important is prayer time to Him? Where would He put it on your list of priorities? Did you ever think to ask Him?

The Lord will put prayer in your life in exactly the right times and exactly the right amounts. And if you let Him, He will adjust your attitudes and feelings about prayer to be the same as his attitudes and feelings about prayer. When I let him adjust my attitudes and values, I become more Christlike. As I become more Christlike, I find more time to pray.

God has given us one whole day each week for prayer! Oh, how I love the Sabbath Day! I love all that it symbolizes.

• That it is observed on Sunday, the first day of the week, a different Holy day than what was observed under the law of Moses.
• The first day of the new week was the day our Savior rose from the tomb. We celebrate his Resurrection on the Sabbath.
• The first day is also the eighth day if we count from the beginning. Eight symbolizes baptism and the new life, redeemed from sin that our Savior offers to those who are baptized and make covenants with him.
• It represents the new life in His kingdom that He offers us when our life ends on this earth.
• It is the day of the Lord. It is His day. It represents the opportunity He gives us to come to Him and share in all that our Father has given Him.  It is a day of rejoicing.
• It is a day of rest. It is a day to enter into His rest. But did He say, “take your boat out on the lake, today, and I will give you rest?” or “Gather all the extended family at grandma’s house and I will give you rest?” or “plant yourself on your sofa and I will give you rest?” The way I remember it, it was something more like, “Come unto me…and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28) What are we using the Sabbath Day for?

The Lord gave us the Sabbath day to come unto Him. It is the only day that I am free enough from other commitments to have big chunks of time to devote to prayer and my desire to come unto Christ. I wouldn’t want to waste it.