I have a confession to make. I’ve always found the subject of prayer…um…boring. For me, the word prayer was a bit like the word budget; it sounded restrictive and dull.

I’d read the missionary stories (God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew and The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom are two that come to mind) and those people made prayer seem vital, real and exciting.

But for me? Not so much.

Yet over the years I’ve prayed a lot and seen God work. I would pray when I was in great pain, pray for others who were experiencing sorrow and sickness and pray for my children when that middle-of-the-night-anxious-worry hit me.

In other words, I was good at crisis praying.

Almost two years ago I began praying weekly with an acquaintance who was going through struggles similar to ones I had experienced. I prayed to encourage her. I marked a date on the calendar and drove to her house just to keep her going. I didn’t want her to quit.

Together, we prayed.

Honestly, in the beginning, our commitment to a regular time of prayer wavered. We shared prayer requests talked too much before we got around to a short time of prayer.

It was a struggle but we kept meeting.

We had been praying together for a year when I moved to a new city with my family and our prayer time had to become a once-a-week phone call at an awkward time of day.

Strange to say, Thursday afternoons at 3 p.m. became the only time that mutually worked for us.

One hour…once a week.

Life is busy when you are middle-aged and the parents of adults, teens, in-betweens and an almost eight-year-old but, believe it or not, one year after my move, we are still praying.

Each week I feel like I’ve gotten a deep, wonderful gulp of life-giving oxygen as I lay my burdens down.

Life is so busy that we don’t want to use up our time together with small talk so we email our requests to each other beforehand. We fight hard to keep our commitment to pray together and it… is… hard.

Life goes on, you know?

Each week we both give all glory to God that we have remained faithful to this one hour of prayer.

It is our life-blood, our oxygen, our giving back to God our worries, fears and problems.

We’ve seen answers and we praise Him for that but, mostly, we’ve found peace and rest in realizing that prayer is not complicated. It is (like a simple budget) not just for the “experts”.

We simply join our voices and our hearts in giving glory to our Great God. We lay our burdens down and we lift up the weak hands of others as we pray.

A faithful prayer partner is a gift from God. You might find one (like I did) through a shared trial. Ask God to bring you a sister in Christ with whom you can come to God in prayer.

“Come let us know, let us press on to know the Lord, for His coming is like the rains, like the spring rains watering the earth.” Hosea 6:9

How do you get enough oxygen for your soul?