Praying Through My Calling

I'll admit that praying doesn't come easy to me and that, left to my own devices, I could not and would not have a robust and powerful prayer life.  And, I suppose that other people may be like me at times.

So, in order to have a prayer life that has meaning, I have employed techniques, normally taken from what I've read or things that have been said to me by other people who couldn't pray as well as they would have liked without those techniques, or perhaps I should say, disciplines.

Over the years, the most helpful techniques I've learned from others have been to meditate on Scripture and to pray Scripture.  Over the many decades of my life, I have committed, I suppose, hundreds of verses and passages of the Word to memory. This is not a boast. In order to meditate on and pray Scripture, you need to know Scripture.

Honestly, for about the past 40 years, the largest portion of my praying has come through meditating on Scripture and putting the words of the Word into the words of prayer.

However, in about the past five years, I have developed another discipline on my own which derives from the other two.

It is to pray through my calling.

I've stated what I believe my calling is a number of times on this blog. I've been able to put it in exact words since before Evie was diagnosed with cancer nearly seven years ago so, I'd say I've known it in precise words for nearly ten years. In that time, I tweaked it once when I came to understand the day to day activity which is its goal. Apart from that, I've only modified it grammatically, because I have a touch of OCD.

The calling makes a lengthy sentence of about 70 words.

My understanding of my calling is hyper biblical. It is nearly all Bible quotations linked together and includes all or part of Jeremiah 1:10, Romans 1:1 and Ephesians 4:11 and 12.

When I reach a crossroads in life, one of the first things I normally do is to pray through my calling, in the form of a prayer, with the crossroads circumstance in mind. And, normally, I repeat that prayer many times over a long period of time.

What normally happens is that one phrase of my calling assumes a place of primary meaning. And, I, then, approach the crossroads from the perspective of that phrase.

I'm at two crossroads these days. One has been in my mind for about six months, the other became known to me only yesterday.

As I've prayed through my calling, different phrases have jumped into the primary position and I will approach them very differently.

In the more recent of the two, the phrase that instructs me that I am to be "a servant of Christ Jesus" has assumed primacy.

It is likely that I will soon be reporting to my Commission and, when I do so, it will be with that understanding of my calling in mind.

Please pray for me as I pray through my calling.