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Authors: Margaret Feinberg
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bike more and nudging the thermostat two degrees lower. A friend even gave up porn; though an awkward announcement, I applauded his efforts and hoped they continued long past Easter.
That year I felt an overwhelming sense that God asked me to give up something rather odd: prayer.
I resisted the impulse.
Why would God ask me to give up prayer? What scripture instructs us to pray less?
The Bible implores us to pray in every situation, to never stop praying. I batted down the ridiculous thought dozens of times, but the notion returned with ever increasing velocity. With Ash Wednesday a few days away, I began asking the Lord what he meant by the idea of giving up prayer for Lent. My sense was that God didn’t want me to give up
all
prayer, but lengthy prayers.
Giving in to the peculiar sacred echo, I committed to offer God only three-word prayers until Easter. The spiritual practice proved more difficult than I imagined. I could no longer thank God for this morning, because that took five words. The conceptneeded to be summed up in three.
Thanks, God, for this morning
became
Thanks for today
. The elementary shift in verbiage translated to a trim here, a rephrasing there, a switcheroo of words over there. Every word, every syllable, demanded mindfulness.
Most mornings I stumbled into lengthier prayers by mistake. I paused and rephrased. Then stumbled again. The painstaking process left me frustrated and edgy. Prayer times expanded, not because I felt close to God, but because crafting even a few comments took so much time.
I also recognized I’d slipped into something one of my favorite writers calls “magical religion”—those moments I convince myself I can control or conjure God through my words or actions. Though I never outwardly admitted to such practices, my new time with God exposed a deep-seated belief that if I just prayed long enough or was more articulate or heartfelt then God would answer.
While I felt free to express every need, ache, desire, and whim to God—which is essential to a true relationship—my petitions often sounded like a child’s sugar-infused run-on sentences:
Dear God, thanks for this day and my husband and his parents and my parents and our one last living grandparent and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our second cousins and our friends and our long-distant friends and our superpup and
. . . I’d rattle on until I ran out of breath. I’d wandered across the invisible border between prayer and rambling and needed to find my way back.
I’d lost sight of God as a loving Father—whose favor I didn’t need to earn, whose attention I didn’t need to procure; God’s eyes were already on me, his hands already extended to help. 1
The difficulty of relearning to pray lessened with each passing week. Fumbling for words dwindled whenever I used a basic breathing rhythm. When I paused for a single breath between prayers, the words rolled silky smooth rather than crunchy and coarse. The arduousness of my morning prayers eased, but I struggled to carry this newfound practice into other areas of life. Whenever Leif and I shared a meal, I would start to offer a standard blessing for our food, and Leif would gently squeeze my hand and whisper, “Three-word prayers.” Even at the dinner table, I couldn’t escape the tension of being intentional.
With each passing day, the process of creating three-word prayers forced me to become more engaged and creative with God. I began offering handcrafted prayers. No longer generic and mass-produced, my prayers felt artisanal.
The word
artisan
technically refers to a craftsperson or skilled worker, but in recent years, artisans and their products have been heralded as representing a departure from the mass manufactured and a return to making things by hand in small batches using time-tested methods. Artisans value personal involvement in conceiving, designing, experimenting, and creating along the way. Artisanal goods are stained with
That year I felt an overwhelming sense that God asked me to give up something rather odd: prayer.
I resisted the impulse.
Why would God ask me to give up prayer? What scripture instructs us to pray less?
The Bible implores us to pray in every situation, to never stop praying. I batted down the ridiculous thought dozens of times, but the notion returned with ever increasing velocity. With Ash Wednesday a few days away, I began asking the Lord what he meant by the idea of giving up prayer for Lent. My sense was that God didn’t want me to give up
all
prayer, but lengthy prayers.
Giving in to the peculiar sacred echo, I committed to offer God only three-word prayers until Easter. The spiritual practice proved more difficult than I imagined. I could no longer thank God for this morning, because that took five words. The conceptneeded to be summed up in three.
Thanks, God, for this morning
became
Thanks for today
. The elementary shift in verbiage translated to a trim here, a rephrasing there, a switcheroo of words over there. Every word, every syllable, demanded mindfulness.
Most mornings I stumbled into lengthier prayers by mistake. I paused and rephrased. Then stumbled again. The painstaking process left me frustrated and edgy. Prayer times expanded, not because I felt close to God, but because crafting even a few comments took so much time.
I also recognized I’d slipped into something one of my favorite writers calls “magical religion”—those moments I convince myself I can control or conjure God through my words or actions. Though I never outwardly admitted to such practices, my new time with God exposed a deep-seated belief that if I just prayed long enough or was more articulate or heartfelt then God would answer.
While I felt free to express every need, ache, desire, and whim to God—which is essential to a true relationship—my petitions often sounded like a child’s sugar-infused run-on sentences:
Dear God, thanks for this day and my husband and his parents and my parents and our one last living grandparent and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our second cousins and our friends and our long-distant friends and our superpup and
. . . I’d rattle on until I ran out of breath. I’d wandered across the invisible border between prayer and rambling and needed to find my way back.
I’d lost sight of God as a loving Father—whose favor I didn’t need to earn, whose attention I didn’t need to procure; God’s eyes were already on me, his hands already extended to help. 1
The difficulty of relearning to pray lessened with each passing week. Fumbling for words dwindled whenever I used a basic breathing rhythm. When I paused for a single breath between prayers, the words rolled silky smooth rather than crunchy and coarse. The arduousness of my morning prayers eased, but I struggled to carry this newfound practice into other areas of life. Whenever Leif and I shared a meal, I would start to offer a standard blessing for our food, and Leif would gently squeeze my hand and whisper, “Three-word prayers.” Even at the dinner table, I couldn’t escape the tension of being intentional.
With each passing day, the process of creating three-word prayers forced me to become more engaged and creative with God. I began offering handcrafted prayers. No longer generic and mass-produced, my prayers felt artisanal.
The word
artisan
technically refers to a craftsperson or skilled worker, but in recent years, artisans and their products have been heralded as representing a departure from the mass manufactured and a return to making things by hand in small batches using time-tested methods. Artisans value personal involvement in conceiving, designing, experimenting, and creating along the way. Artisanal goods are stained with
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