Would You Give Him Five Minutes? Making a Habit of Personal Prayer
Editor’s Note: We’re blessed to regularly share with you the wisdom and experience of women who have faithfully walked before us. Here, a seasoned mom, grandma, and pastor’s wife shares her story of developing a personal prayer life. We hope you’ll find some helpful tips for carving out your own dedicated times with the Lord and be encouraged that even small commitments can add up to big impact! For additional resources on prayer, check out our landing page for the Prayer podcast series.
I was tired of feeling guilty. I was embarrassed by how little I prayed and troubled by not following through on prayer requests from family and friends. I was ashamed of not practicing what I often encouraged others to do. I was also yearning. I hungered for deeper intimacy with my King. I wanted to experience the reality of answered prayer. And I longed to genuinely help bear the burdens of others as we stumbled together toward heaven.
That guilt and longing finally motivated me to change. I decided that rather than fuss and fret over my failings, I would ask the Lord to help me grow in my prayer life. And he answered that prayer! God brought into my life a wise, older woman who cared about my spiritual well-being. As we got to know each other, she asked if she could share with me some of the spiritual patterns she had been practicing through the years. I was eager for her help.
During one of our times together, she talked with me about the importance of prayer and what her prayer life looked like. Then she showed me her prayer notebook, with its different sections, and encouraged me to develop my own. She was speaking my heart language! I have always appreciated order and structure, so I loved how this might help me better organize my prayers. I bought a leather notebook[1] and all the inner workings that I needed to get organized. After deciding what I wanted to pray for daily, I designated each day of the week for added requests. Through the years, my prayer concerns broadened as our family grew and my responsibilities expanded, but that notebook has served me well since 1975.
Here is a peek into my prayer notebook these days:
Daily: Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication; my personal needs, and the needs of my husband and immediate family
Sunday: Ministry connections, our church
Monday: Our extended families
Tuesday: Current discipleship group and past disciples with special concerns
Wednesday: Young friends, children with special needs, our Compassion kids
Thursday: Pastor and ministry wives, missionaries
Friday: Friends
Saturday: Unsaved
In my life, I’ve found I benefit from having an established system to record requests and God’s answers. I need a safe and intimate way to pour out my heart as I write prayers to my Lord.[2] I like having a place to record my promise when I tell someone, “I’ll pray for you.” It also helps me call to mind the needs of a friend I may be meeting after a prolonged absence. As much as possible, I like to keep pictures of the person or family I’m praying for on their page, often cut from their Christmas cards. When I visit with our grandchildren, I often show them their individual page and ask them to sign and date it, including any specific requests they’d like me to pray over.
When my notebook gets too full, I take the pages out and tuck them away in a small box labelled “Jani’s Prayers, 1975—.” One of the reasons my notebook works well for me is that filing these pages away in my prayer box takes less space than storing completed prayer journals. That beloved box has travelled with me through seven moves! What an encouragement it is to be able to go back through years of communion with God and see how he has met me in my desires and needs.
But I have learned through the years that an organized prayer notebook does not necessarily produce a consistent prayer life! The strange thing is, I have always firmly believed in the power of prayer. I have even taught others about engaging in daily prayer. But a few years ago, I finally acknowledged that, after my early morning Bible reading, I’d frequently rush to begin my to-do list for the day, skipping the personal communion with my Father that I ascribed to but didn’t consistently practice.
And that’s when the guilt started mounting. I had heard Tim Keller say that brief, sporadic prayer happens because we do not make time for it, and it shows a lack of dependence—a self-sufficiency. That rang true in my life. I had to admit that I wasn’t making time for it.
Something had to change. The Lord helped me commit to a certain amount of prayer each day during my early morning times with him. I wanted to be realistic, so I started small—embarrassingly small. I told the Lord I would commit to five minutes of either oral or written prayer to him each day for the next year. Five minutes—only five minutes. But I wanted my goal to be reachable and expandable.
And so I began. I had my daily time in the Word and then set a timer for five minutes and prayed either audibly or by recording my conversation with God in my prayer notebook. Soon I didn’t need to set the timer anymore—I just prayed for about five minutes, sometimes longer. And as I did, I began to notice something. The guilt started lifting and the longing sweetened into a joyful anticipation of a heart-to-heart talk with a cherished friend.
As that year drew to a close, I began formulating my goals for the coming year. I wanted to keep growing in my prayer life, but in a way that was both measurable and manageable. I dreamed big and decided to add one more minute to my prayer life for that year! Six whole minutes—it seemed so puny in light of eternity. But it was so much better than the sporadic way I had been praying before. And I made one more commitment to the Lord—I would add one more minute each year until I was praying a full thirty minutes or more each morning. By then I would be in my mid-eighties and probably have even more opportunity for longer, daily prayer times.
Let me ask you, what can you accomplish in five minutes? Put on your makeup, scramble some eggs for your three-year-old, or take care of that fragrant diaper your baby is oblivious to? If you are like me, a normal day consists of close to fifteen hours of wakeful productivity. That’s approximately 900 minutes. What would you think of giving God just five of those minutes each day in prayer? Then next year, add another minute and so on until you reach a satisfying prayer practice. Why not? What would hold you back from talking with Jesus for five minutes each day? Please don’t wait as long as I did to start! The blessings will far outweigh any effort on your part. God bless you as he welcomes you into his presence.
“But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you” (Psalm 88:13).
[1] https://www.scullyplanner.com
[2] Psalm 62:8
