Time to Pray

Sam Rainer

In case you didn’t know, it takes about six hours to push mow a little more than an acre. My wife and I were blessed to buy a house in corn country in our move to Southern Indiana. Our new home is situated on about an acre. The lawn is a big change from the doll-sized townhouse, which had a yard with the same surface area as our kitchen table.

Since the previous owners of our new home were not the least bit motivated to trim the grass after we made an offer, it came with shin-high foliage. So that first weekend I was going to give home ownership a whirl with some yard work. After a trip to Home Depot, I was well-equipped with a 22 cc Echo trimmer and a Ryobi 205 mph velocity blower. What I lacked was a man-sized mower. But I figured I could push mow the flat-as-a-frying-pan lot fairly quickly. I was wrong.

What began as a relaxing day in the yard got quite old after several hours of mowing, and mowing, and mowing, and mowing. My wife, who had earlier gone yard sale-ing, came home to see me circling the yard in a rabid mowing frenzy. The back-and-forth cadence is enough to drive anyone mad.

“I’m going to get a decent walk-behind this week.”

“Ok, honey,” she knew that I couldn’t say anything about money spent at the next year’s worth of yard sales if I was going to buy a new, bigger, badder, mower.

I am ecstatic to report that tomorrow I will become the proud owner of a Red Hawk 48” 18 HP belt-driven 603 pound 5-speed grass-shredding machine. No more wimpy push mower for me.

The connection between mowing and praying I know is not an easy one to make – unless, of course, you are my wife praying that I don’t kill myself with my new mowing monster. But what I became convicted of during my devotional time was that I spent more time behind a mower this week than on my knees in prayer. If you were to compare my prayer life to my time spent in front of the TV, it would be even worse ratio.

It seems so easy to write-off our prayer life, blaming it on a lack of time. I hear of prayer warriors spending two-hours a day in prayer, and my initial reaction is “how do they find the time?” But then I realize that I spend 6 hours a week in yard work, 1-2 hours a day working out, an additional 1-2 hours a day glued to the boob tube, and another hour a day reading…every bit of it is selfish time.

Where’d the time go? It was spent on me. My prayer time/selfish time ratio is quite poor.

But the Lord delights in the prayer of the upright. The Lord of the universe actually listens to us. And we are to be persistent in prayer. We are to pray constantly.

One of Satan’s greatest tools is time. He tells us that we have plenty of time to get back on track, no need to hurry. He tells us that there will be plenty of time to serve our Lord later. And he uses our own selfish endeavors to lead us to believe that there is no time to pray. What are some ways for you to improve you prayer time ratio? While we need to “be still” and pray in a quite place, I find personally that praying while running, mowing, and driving helps me maintain a better perspective.