Sometimes prayer ought to be less about what we are saying to God and more about listening to what He is saying to us! I came across a passage by Leonard Sweet this morning when I was reading his book "Nudge."
"Prayer is not getting God to pay attention, but learning to pay attention ourselves to what God is doing. Semiotic praying is listening, listening, listening to God speaking to us now." (Sweet, 2010: 52.) According to Wikipedia, Semiotics is the study of communication, focusing especially on three aspects of communication: "Semantics-Relation between signs and the things to which they refer, Syntactics-Relations among signs in formal structures, and Pragmatics-Relation between signs and their effects on the people who use them."
So we sat for ten minutes of (admittedly) awkward silence before praying out loud. I could tell it was a good exercise because I could feel my heart rate slowing, my mind began to clear, still I was worried about what everyone else thought. Its going to take some repetition to get used to it. Eastern based religions have this advantage that they are better at getting quiet! Westerners tend to feel uncomfortable with silence; however, the reward of hearing God's voice must surely outweigh the discomfort!
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