Find time to pray is a primary challenge, maybe the primary challenge, for the contemporary Christian. The Devil and all his angels are working full-time in a conspiracy to fill up the hours of each day with urgent duties, responsible enterprises, and, if we should happen to find ourselves unemployed in some odd hour or other, frivolous distractions. Even our friends and pastors seem, more often than not, to be partners in the conspiracy.

That fact that this is happening at a time and in a culture in which we are surfeited with labor-saving devices, and, in North America at least, have a standard of living that technically permits considerable leisure, indicates that the problem has little to do with "finding time" to pray and more with learning how to pray in adverse conditions - conditions in which we are taught that time is a commodity ("time is money") rather than an aspect of God's eternity.

That also is why I think you are going at it from the wrong end. You don't "find time" to pray by arranging and then re-arranging your schedule. The very first thing to do in finding time to pray is to throw away your Daytimer.

I mean it. Throw it away. Your Daytimer may be very useful for organizing the world's work and your social calendar, getting you to your job on time, and showing up for appointments you've agreed upon. But it has a negative effect on your praying life because it reinforces the sense that time is a quantitative thing that you control when in fact it is a vast dimension of creation that you find yourself in.

I would encourage you to re-conceive your day as a ritual -- a rhythmic sequence of movements in sacred space and time -- which you enter, rather than as a schedule into which you fit yourself. Schedules are wooden, inflexible, static, impersonal. Rituals are elastic, spacious, dynamic, and participatory.

You either keep to a schedule or don't. But a ritual is capable of infinite variations and adaptations -- the proportions and movement are the thing, the relationships, the encounters, the rhythms. Fitting prayer into a schedule is like trying to fit God into a schedule. The schedule is the secularization of the ritual and the Daytimer is its Bible.

I know that there are many practical details that have to be met and decided upon; I'm not oblivious to any of them. But I am convinced that regarding prayer, the most significant thing we can do begins in the imagination: seeing the day (week, month, year) as a ritual in which we are entering, responding, and participating in the ways of God. Not carving out time for God -- how condescending that sounds!

I'm not saying that rituals are easier than schedules. Hardly! They are much more difficult and require much attention and discipline -- just as dancing a ballet requires far more of you than marching in the infantry. What I am saying is that something like a ritual is the only way in which we will ever have adequate and leisurely time and space for prayer. Yes, throw away your Daytimer; it's the only way you'll ever get a chance at coming upon what Paul meant when he said, "Pray without ceasing."

The peace of our Lord,

Eugene

From The Wisdom of Each Other, Eugene H. Peterson