Making Room for Prayer When Life Won't Slow Down

I don’t know about you, but one of the areas of my life I feel like I am constantly trying to get better at is my prayer life.

I remember my grandmother praying all the time. She was one of those church ladies who said they would pray for you and meant it. And I think it’s because she heard her mother make it a regular rhythm in her life, too. My great-grandmother would kneel and pray for her children (my grandmother), her children’s children (my father), and her children’s children’s children (me!).

I have seen the impact of prayer on my own life. I have prayed for people and seen them healed. I have prayed and seen God provide supernatural provision and emotional healing. So why, when I know how good God is, do I still struggle to pray sometimes?

This fall, my Bible study group has been going through a book called Relaxed. When we started reading the book, I think most of us thought, Yeah, right. Most of us are moms of young children, and relaxed is not a word most of us would use to describe our days.

But what I love about this study is that it’s not asking us to be relaxed on our own. In fact, the whole study is about how Jesus was relaxed despite facing storms, persecution, and conflict. He had perfect trust in His Heavenly Father.

Here is the great news: God is not waiting on you to find peace on your own. He is not waiting for you to simply “have enough faith.” He is waiting for you to sit at His feet.

I have loved going through this study because it has challenged my perspective on what it means to pray and how to pray in a way that puts control back into God’s hands rather than trying to hold on to it with my own.

The whole purpose of prayer is not to take control, but to recognize that the safest place for you to be is at the feet of your Father and in the center of His will.

With this in mind, I realized that a plan for prayer isn’t just setting a thirty-minute block on your calendar and hoping for the best. It is having a plan for when you pray, what you bring to Him, and how you bring it.

1. When You Pray

The Bible teaches that prayer is something we should be engaging in every day. So why is it that we have such a hard time doing it?

First, we don’t give it a time.

Sometimes setting a time feels like a big commitment, especially as women. We might plan to get up at 6 a.m. to pray, but then one of our kids gets up earlier than usual. Or we might plan to pray during nap time, but an unexpected bill needs to be paid, or someone spilled chocolate milk in the car and it needs to be cleaned up.

One thing that has helped me is remembering that prayer is a day-long conversation with God. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says to pray without ceasing!

Yes, focused times of prayer are important. But I find that if I can set prayer triggers throughout my day, I can spend more time with Him than if I’m hunting for a full thirty minutes.

You can do this, too, by identifying three things you do every single day.

For me, the first is unloading my dishwasher. I do this every single morning, and it is a great opportunity to take a few minutes with God, thank and praise Him for the day ahead, and open my heart to what He wants to do in me that day.

Then, exercise. I love to take walks or go on runs in the evening. Even if I don’t use the whole walk, it’s quiet time when I can open my heart to God and pray about what has been on my mind throughout the day.

Finally, car time. Whether I’m driving to a sports practice, dropping someone off at school, or running an errand, I spend at least twenty minutes in the car almost every day. And because I’m usually going somewhere for my kids, it is a great opportunity to pray over them, their school, and their teams.

2. What You Bring

One of my biggest challenges when I pray is how much my mind wanders.

I’m constantly drifting from praying, “God, I thank You for everything You do for me. You are a good God,” to my own thoughts, like, “Did I remember to buy a birthday gift for that party? I haven’t seen my toddler in a minute. Is she getting into something she shouldn’t?”

I used to feel so discouraged by it. I felt like I was bad at praying because I wasn’t focusing the way I wanted to.

But remember what the Bible says in Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Those thoughts aren’t just random. They often reveal where I am putting my treasure. Sometimes they are worries. Sometimes they are things I enjoy. Sometimes they’re my hopes or goals. So instead of getting frustrated with myself for having them, I have started taking them to God.

Instead of treating my wandering thoughts like a stop sign or a reason to get frustrated with myself and stop praying, I use them as an on-ramp to the topics God really wants to talk to me about.

If I’m unloading the dishwasher and I keep thinking about my bills, I can take them to God right there!

If I’m in the car and I’m thinking about a passion project, I can thank God for it, thank Him for giving me the gifts and talents to pursue it, and ask Him to help me keep it in the right place in my life.

3. How You Bring It

But even with all these tools, sometimes there are moments when we just don’t know what to pray. Our thoughts wander. Our focused words feel so small compared to our circumstances. And we just don’t know how God could answer us or what exactly He wills for us in that moment.

That is why God gave us the Holy Spirit.

Romans 8:26–27 says this:

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

When you pray in the Spirit, God hears your prayers, and you can trust that the Spirit is interceding according to His will.

Isn’t that comforting? That when you don’t know what to say, your Heavenly Father has already given you the Holy Spirit to help you pray.

Using these three steps, I have found it much easier to make prayer a regular rhythm in my life.

I know that the people I look up to most, like my grandmother, were people of prayer. They used the big gaps in their lives and the little ones to lift up their needs and the needs of others to the God who knows what is best.

As you go about this week, my prayer is that you (and I) would experience the richness that comes from a heart that sits daily at the feet of Jesus.