In recent posts, I have been writing about my journey through different stages of prayer. When I first started to pray, I treated God like a divine Santa. My prayers never went beyond asking God for things. Then I learned to expand my prayer to include other elements, like honoring God, confessing, giving thanks, and of course asking for things. Then I learned to treat prayer as a two-way conversation. I learned to devote time to listen to God. My journey took me through Santa prayers to formal prayers and then conversational prayers.

Conversational prayer is wonderful, but there is one more stop on the journey or prayer. I call it full-time prayer. Some time after college, I began to realize that my standard approach to prayer was to pray when I wanted. If my prayers were like a telephone call, it was the bat-phone. It only rang one way. But what if the prayer phone rings both ways?

Full-time prayer can happen in the order Walter Wangerin Jr. describes: we speak, God listens, God speaks, we listen. But it can also be reordered. Full-time prayer can also be ordered like this: God speaks, we listen, we speak, God listens. Full-time prayer is constant. It is how someone who has stopped practicing discipleship and started being a disciple prays.

This is the kind of prayer Paul writes about in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 when he instructs the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing.” We are not the only ones who can initiate a prayer conversation. But if we are going to engage in full-time prayer, we need to be attentive. We need to be constantly in the presence of God in order to hear his invitation into conversation.

This is what Brother Lawrence meant when he spoke about practicing the presence of God and why he says our time in the real world feeds our set aside times of prayer and not the other way around.

Last week, I wrote about the first two approaches I took to prayer. I’m not sure it works this way with everyone, but for me, these approaches were stages along my journey, each a little more mature than the last. I call the third approach conversational prayer. After graduating from Santa prayers to formal prayers, I grew to understand the importance of listening in prayer. I realized prayer, like any conversation, goes go both ways. I learned to pray and do my best to listen for God’s response.

I first experienced this kind of prayer when I was in junior high. My dad was encouraging me to move in with him (my parents were divorced and I lived with my mother). He told me to go home and pray about the decision. He told me to listen, to expect God to answer my prayer. I didn’t know what to expect, but I trusted my dad. I went home. I prayed. I listened. And God answered. I didn’t hear an audible voice, but the words “It’s going to be all right” started rattling around in my head.

The circumstance leading to my dad’s request to move in with him was my tendency to not follow through on things. He saw a pattern in my life that he recognized in his own and he believed living with him would have a positive impact on me. The words “It’s going to be all right” felt like God telling me to stay with my mother. This is the first time I remember hearing directly from God.

I wish I had started to listen to God from that day forward, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until college when I read more and started to practice this approach regularly. It was in this season that I began the practice of Enoch walks. I would walk and speak to God as if he was walking beside me. I spoke. I asked questions, and I waited for God to respond. And he did! More often than not, I was able to hear God’s answer. Like his answer to my question about where I should live, it was never an audible voice, but a thought that rattled around in my head.

It has been difficult at times to discern if the thought is my own or God’s, but over time it has become more clear. It’s not easy, and I still put the thoughts up to the scrutiny of Scripture. But I have come to the point where more often than not it is obvious when the thoughts are mine and when the thoughts are God’s.