Have you ever found yourself in that moment where you hear someone else express how many minutes or hours they spend in prayer each day, and you suddenly feel woefully incompetent? Maybe for you the idea of praying for more than a few minutes at a time seems insane! Not because you don’t want to, in theory, but because when you sit down to just pray, a minute feels like an hour, and not in a good way!

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First, let us put to bed these kind of comparison traps that the enemy uses to bloom shame in our hearts. Rather than allowing such things to breed shame in us, though, could it instead inspire us toward growth in our prayer life? God will certainly not love you more if you were to pray more, but if you prayed more, I wonder if your love for HIM might certainly grow?

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The key here, friend, is to start small. Consider where you’re at now: what feels like a “normal” amount of prayer time for you? Is it an hour? Fifteen minutes? Five minutes? One minute? Zero minutes? No shame – just determine where you’re at.

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Then, ask God right now, what’s my next step? Ask him to give you a reasonable goal for your prayer time this weekend. Try it today and tomorrow and see how it goes.

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Maybe if you generally pray for about one minute, set a timer for five minutes, and see if it’s that difficult to pray the whole time. Maybe if you generally spend five minutes in prayer, you stretch yourself toward fifteen. If you’ve never tried praying for an extended period of time before, set a timer for two minutes and try! God is not going to condemn you if you get distracted or say the same thing over and over; he’s going to love your heart to spend more time with him, even as it’s imperfect.

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I’m praying this practice blesses you today, friends!