There is a tendency today for people to say, with greater or less distress, that they have no time for prayer. What they mean is, that they do not have a peaceful hour, or two peaceful half hours, or even three peaceful twenty minutes. If that is the day God has given them, then He awaits their praying hearts under precisely these conditions. They are testing conditions, surely, but never impossible. Most of us can manage a ten-minute silence. It may have to be in the lavatory, or the bath, or the car, or standing at the station, or when the baby's just gone to sleep. But for most people it is possible. If you can spend it sitting quietly, I rejoice for you. But this concentrated time when you try to put aside all else and simply be there for God is the proof, as it were, of your desire to pray.
Take these times, poor crumbs of minutes, though they be, and give yourself to God in them. You will not be able to feel prayerful in them, but that is beside the point. You pray for God's sake, you are there for Him to look on you, to love you, to take His holy pleasure in you. What can it matter whether you feel any of this or get any comfort from it? We should be misers in prayer, scraping up these flinders of time and holding them out trustfully to the Father. But we should also watch out for the longer stretches we may be missing because we do not want to see them. Many things that are pleasant and profitable - television programs, books, conversations - may have to be sacrificed at times. But you will make this and any other sacrifice if you hunger and thirst for God to possess you, and this is my whole point. There is time enough for what matters supremely to us, and there always will be.
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