How to focus your praying

'I do not find prayer easy. In fact I have always found prayer the most difficult of things. Why is this? Perhaps because it is the most spiritual, most powerful, most resisted by the flesh. The missionary James Hudson Taylor once wrote to a Canadian couple embarking on missions to a demanding part of China: "Brother, if you would enter that Province, you must go forward on your knees" Prayer is contestation and so prayer is contested.

I can fall asleep in any position praying.....and consequently have employed numerous techniques or practical prayer-focussed activities to stop my mind wandering. I have tried prayer-walking, prayer stools, candles, rosaries- even rotating a fifty pence coin around my hand and praying for an individual each time I touch one of the five edges. I have prayed in tongues, cited scriptures, prayed lying down, standing, rocking like Orthodox Jews, sitting, kneeling, walking. I used to have my wife drop me five miles from my house so I would walk back praying. Prayer lists, staring at icons, liturgical set prayers, Jesus prayer, writing prayers, reading prayers. I still feel a failure and a complete novice.

But I have found two things that focus my prayers and keep me awake and attentive: times of personal trial and praying for friends and family who do not know Jesus. When my prayers are for the lost, I find that there is faith, and fire, and I know the Spirit guiding me. If you are having trouble praying, make a list of ten people who do not know the Lord and commit to praying for them daily'

God is for us, P. 274

This info-graphic is fun. I have also been reading 'The Soul Winner'....