The Ten-Second Prayer Principle by Mark Littleton

Author:Mark Littleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

All of these moments are ripe for prayer. You don’t have to use every second of such downtimes to pray. Just pray as it occurs to you to do so. Pray for the people and things you see around you. I’ve prayed for dogs, cats, and even hamsters. I’ve prayed for multitudes of people I’ll probably never see again during my whole sojourn on this earth. I’ve prayed about needs mentioned in church and elsewhere and then forgotten about them the next moment.

But God doesn’t forget.

Let me give you two recent examples of brief prayers I offered in my downtimes with barely a second thought—until I saw how God had answered them.

Over the last couple of years, our house has become cluttered with a lot of junk. It needed a major cleaning. My wife and I, working feverishly every day as self-employed freelance writers, just didn’t have time to keep up with the housecleaning. During several downtime prayer sessions, it seemed God was whispering to me the idea of doing something special about the problem. I prayed about it several times and seemed especially to think of it when I was driving or sitting in the doctor’s office, two primary downtimes I use for praying. As I prayed, I got the idea to surprise Jeanette for Mother’s Day with a clean house.

We happened to be traveling to Colorado for a writers’ conference around that time, so I hired someone to do the job while we were away. My plan seemed great. The woman I hired was a close friend of Jeanette’s and had long wanted to do something special for her, so she was excited about helping.

When I delivered our front-door key to the woman’s house, I explained something extremely important: our door had two deadbolts. The lower one was broken. It could be locked from the outside, but it could not opened from the inside. So if it got locked while we were in the house, we couldn’t get out unless someone went around to the front door and opened it from the outside. I made clear that only the top deadbolt key would work. I didn’t even think about giving her the other key, because I didn’t intend to use the lower lock.

When I left the woman’s house, I prayed during my downtime driving home. I rattled off several things pertaining to our upcoming trip, and then I said, “Lord, I pray that everything will go smoothly with this cleaning. Help it to go off without a hitch.” Figuring everything was covered, I didn’t think much about it after that.

On the day of the trip, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Alisha, was the last one out the door, so she was the one to lock it. While I waited in the minivan for everyone to finish up and get in, I prayed a typical traveling prayer: that God would give us a good trip, that he’d keep us safe and keep the van in good working order, that he’d protect

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