Dawson Trotman by The Navigators

Author:The Navigators
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Navigators
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Journal Entry, July 14, 1931

“I find the hardest thing for me to do is to get to prayer. God is able to make me a man of prayer if it pleases Him.”

Men of prayer do not appear to be born that way. In the case of Jesus’ disciples, this certainly seems to be true. These men had grown up in the synagogue, had participated in the ritual festivals at Jerusalem, had journeyed far from home to personally witness the ministry of John the Baptist, and finally, they had committed themselves to the demands of becoming disciples of Jesus. They were not strangers to the world of prayer. They had been exposed to prayer throughout the entirety of their lives, but exposure to prayer had not made them men of prayer.

Most New Testament scholars agree that Luke’s gospel is constructed thematically rather than chronologically, making it difficult to date with certainty many events in relation to the years of the public ministry of Jesus. However, regardless of whether the disciples had been with Jesus for three months or for three years when they asked His advice on prayer, three things are clear from this one verse of Scripture. First, the disciples had been with Jesus long enough for them to have observed His habits of prayer and to have built up confidence in His standing as a teacher and leader. Second, even though all the young men of Israel grew up within a culture filled with ritual prayer in home and synagogue and temple, both the disciples of John and the disciples of Jesus needed specific teaching and training in prayer as part of the “discipling” process. Third, the disciples of Jesus were aware enough that their prayer lives needed this help to ask for it.

In the middle of 1931, Daws was still a young Christian in many respects, but he was maturing quickly. He was already “down to business” in regular memorization of Scripture, he was active in the “personal work” of evangelism, and he was busy organizing Fisherman’s Clubs in and around Lomita. He had also begun to establish the habit of spending extended times in prayer, both alone and with other men.

This journal entry appears directly below one of the earliest ink drawings of the Wheel. Of the four spokes of the Wheel (prayer, witnessing, word, and fellowship), Daws observed in himself that “the hardest thing for me to get to is prayer.” In a journal entry for April 1 of that year he had written simply, “Prayerless — I struggle.” Less than a week later, on April 6, he noted that he spent the entire day in prayer. The very next day he lamented, “I must learn to pray.” Over the next several months, Daws learned to discipline himself to prayer through hours and hours out on “the hill,” alone with God or in the fellowship of like-minded men of God. His journals show that he continued to feel that prayer was the “hardest thing … to

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