Praying without Losing Heart

I am preparing a sermon for October 17 based on the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-8.  I'm wondering, when are you tempted to give up on prayer?  And alternately, what motives you to keep on persisting with prayer?

Pray All The Time

"Pray all the time" is Eugene Peterson's rendering of First Thessalonians 5:17 in The Message.  I've chosen it as the title of this new blog partly because this has always been one of my favorite verses.  It is also something of an ironic choice of title because I feel like I am a long way from being a practitioner of unceasing prayer.  Like the pilgrim who wandered all over Russia seeking to find out what it means to "pray without ceasing," I sometimes feel like I've been wandering through my life seeking the answer to the same question.

Incidentally, The Way of a Pilgrim is the English translation of a nineteenth-century Russian spiritual classic by an anonymous author.  I first heard of it when I was reading J. D. Salinger's Franny & Zooey, and initially I assumed that J. D. Salinger had simply made it up.  Then years later I found a small, paperback copy of The Way of a Pilgrim in a used bookstore.

I hope that this blog will become a contemporary chronicle of a pilgrim seeking to learn what it means to pray all the time.