Prayer Lists

             Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. (I Peter 2:2-3)

 

In connection with what I wrote yesterday about the possibility that I’m wrong, I’m feeling the need to go back to basics - craving spiritual milk because somehow, I missed something. It’s a little embarrassing, craving milk like a newborn, but the truth probably is that we are newborns many times in many ways in our lives. From God’s perspective, we may never be anything more than newborns, forever needing that milk. On the other hand, being a newborn can also be exciting because so much is new.

My mind is playing pinball - ricocheting from one idea to the next and through six more before it happens to hit the third again. The main topic is prayer. I have at least seven organizing structures all somewhat influenced by the movie War Room, which I’ve never seen. The first is to make a house of prayer by associating rooms in a house (real or imaginary) and its grounds and outbuildings with specific topics. Another is to take the police procedural approach of working up “whiteboards” of people and topics. Two others involve the elements of the soul as described by Dallas Willard, the Fruit of the Spirit, the Armor of God, or the ten areas that the book I’m reading describes as our weak or attacked spots. (I’ll go into those another time.)  As I said - pinball…ricochet!

These organizing structures aren’t mutually exclusive. I could base the rooms of the house on the Fruit of the Spirit, the Armor, the elements of the soul, or the ten areas mentioned above. The same goes for the white boards.

Oh, I can see it from here - the rolling eyes. And I can hear the heavy sighs of “Why can’t she just make a list in a notebook? Why does she have to complicate everything?” But I do make simple lists, and then I never pray through them again because nothing brings most of the items on the list to mind. The list isn’t in my face. So, now we switch from me to you with a couple of questions:

1.     How do you organize your prayer list?

2.     If you were going to associate categories of prayer concerns with rooms of a house and grounds, what would you associate with which rooms or areas?