by Tiffany Coursey
Prayer time has always been hard for me. My natural tendency is not quiet. When I try, it’s like my mind becomes louder and faster, making it hard for me to turn my eyes off the world and toward God. I know this time is important, and I have spent the last few years searching for ways to help me turn down my own voice so that I can hear His.
One tool I like to use to settle my mind for prayer is to start with meditation – just a minute or two of emptying my brain and slowing everything down. I am better at this some days than others. Some days my meditation is more like chasing a rabbit, and I need something more than silence to center me. On those days, I used worship music to center myself and turn my eyes to the Lord.
As I have looked for ways to quiet the regular hum in my brain, one of the most effective for me is to write Scripture. I use this in two ways during my prayer time. One is to focus my brain away from this world and meditate on God’s Word. I also use it as my prayers. I often look to big buckets of things in a particular season of life and find verses that reflect my heart in those areas. In my prayer time, I use them as prompts. Like all of my tools, some days, these prayers are little more than reading the verses I’ve written. Even those days help me remember what God has said or promised or challenged me to meditate on. They give me words that I can’t find and encourage me to find my own words.
The tool that offers me the richest and most honest conversations with God is journaling and writing my prayers. It is also the one I am most resistant to sometimes. Being honest about my feelings to myself is hard. This is probably why the silence of quiet time can be deafening. It is as if my internal defense mechanisms are trying to be too loud for me to find myself. When I spend time journaling, I can process what I am dealing with and quiet the noise that distracts me. These thoughts naturally move to prayers or cries for him to intercede in my life or the lives of those I love. These are the cries of my heart, and it is often in these moments that I can really be quiet enough to hear him.
In my favorite prayer times, I create space to do all of these things together. Each moves me closer into time with God…and keeps me there. Too often, I don’t make space for all of these tools each day. On those days, I trust that the Lord is pleased that I came to him and continue to work toward creating the space he deserves in my day.
Tiffany is a Nashville native and lives in her childhood home with her husband, Brandon, and dog, Buddy. Tiffany works in Human Resources at a local Real Estate company, and enjoys reading, being in nature, and spending time with her family and friends.