Letters #012: Pause and Pray 🙏🏾

I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a particular post and thought “oh wow, so sad”. Almost immediately, I was scrolling to the next post but then I got a sense of “calm down ma, not so fast, don’t just say how sad and move on like that na. Go back there, pause and then do something.”

As believers, one habit we often look to imbibe more of is praying often and consistently, which is absolutely great. After all, we are told, “men ought always to pray and not to faint.”

However, I think one reason why we struggle with it is often that we’re looking inwards too much or we are constantly in a rush. Now, looking inwards is not bad and we are encouraged to talk about ourselves and our needs with God so there’s certainly room for that part.

But something the Holy Spirit has been teaching me is a concept I think of as pause and pray (it’s nothing big, I just coined that 😂) and I will explain in a bit. Have you realized that you can often engage people easily if you’re speaking to them about a matter they’re interested in? Or if you settle down to speak with them instead of just rushing in and rushing out? Hold that thought for a second.

Jesus’s life on earth was very much characterized by compassion. His miracles and everything He did was a function of His “being moved to compassion”. If like we are taught, prayer is about having conversations and as I stated above conversations tend to flow freely when we speak with people about things of interest to them or when we sit down with them, not rushing in and out, it goes without saying that one way we can build our prayer muscles is building our ability to pause and our compassion muscles and that’s what the concept “pause and pray” is about.

We can find many avenues to pray and engage God if we let compassion flow through our hearts. One way to do that is to pause, and let things sink in. Don’t just rush through life, your day or whatever you are doing. If we take a moment to wait when someone crosses our minds or even when scrolling through social media, and then engage God over that thing or person, we could very easily find ourselves conversing with God almost all through our day.

And being compassionate is not difficult. Paul in his writings makes mention of how as God’s people we can put on compassion because it is a part of the new life we now have. We have God’s Spirit in us and if His Spirit is in us, then we can know His heart and feel what He feels, we can be in tune with Him. The key thing, however, is we have to pause, it’s like putting our heads on His heart to hear His heartbeat and then when we pause, we go on to say a word or many words of prayers.

So I’m challenging you as the Holy Spirit is me, to embrace pause moments, and to live compassionately and you’ll find that as a result, you get to enjoy many more conversations with God.

Right now, where you are, will you pause for a moment and offer up prayers for yourself, someone you know or perhaps the world at large?

Here’s to a life of prayer.

Ciao ciao fellow pauser,

❤️ Yami

P.S. I apologise for the long silence.
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