Weekly Newsletter: Prayer is the Work

Perhaps your office wall is already wallpapered with certificates, diplomas, and other marketplace achievements. Regardless of how many skills you’ve mastered in your career, here’s one I’m going to challenge you to brush up on:

Prayer.

In fact, I believe that prayer is the most important workplace skill you can acquire. Most of us know we should pray. I believe most of us want to pray more and pray better. But if you’re like me, prayer can be a bit strange. It’s mysterious, ethereal, and really hard to put handles on.

So how can you and I learn to pray better? Here’s a little exercise I use that goes all the way back to some of the early Church fathers. Take the Lord’s model prayer and pray through each phrase, putting the core ideas into your own words.

This “gateway” to prayer helps harness our scattered thoughts and rabbit trail requests. And when Jesus says “pray this way,” it’s probably worth taking a good long look.

I wrote down my own version of this exercise today and shared it on social media. It went like this:

Do you see how this exercise can help give a more defined prayer pathway to what often feels like a wilderness wandering of words? I encourage you to give it a try. It’s a daily discipline that has helped me immensely in my own life. Here’s an article we published awhile back that takes a deeper dive.

Prayer isn’t just something we do before we engage our everyday work. Prayer actually is the work.

Will you commit with me to make prayer a priority this week?

Accelerating the Great Commission through the Marketplace,

Erik Cooper | The Stone Table