22/8/21: ‘A minute a day to pray’

Some years ago I decided to start writing short prayers based around Bible verses. I suppose the reason for doing this was that I have always found prayer difficult, and thought that this could help to be a focus to praying on a regular basis.

It was over the Christmas period when time was weighing rather heavily on my hands – in Uganda during lockdown, had only been here for 6 weeks, including 2 weeks self-isolation, and was in a 4 week break when there were many restrictions on what I could do – that I came up with the idea of uploading videos of Bible readings and associated prayers on a daily basis, whole thing less than a minute. With some gaps – for a number of reasons I found this difficult to maintain whilst in the UK but have picked it up again now – I have been keeping this up since. Often the Bible readings are stand alone, I’ve had a number of series around the Easter period, going through the Lord’s prayer a verse at a time, currently going through Psalm 95, although aware there are some difficult verses ahead!

In my more optimistic moments I had visualised the idea going viral across the English speaking world – reading the Bible and praying each day may be a tough discipline, but you can’t reasonably tell me that Christians can’t spare a minute for doing so! But it hasn’t, or any where close. It’s a rare day when the downloads get into double figures. So why do I persist?

Number of reasons. It helps give me a focus in my prayer life to be doing this, I continue to find individual prayer hard but believe so strongly that it is important in our Christian lives. I’ve had some great encouragement from people who find what I do helpful, RG, thank you for your lovely messages of support, I find them really motivating!

There are a number of other people I need to thank. JZ, I do try to smile at the beginning of the recordings! And also have experimented with having a separate picture as the thumb nail to give an encouragement to come and pray.

And LS, thank you for your points about the quality of the videos, until the last 2 days I’ve been using the camera on my laptop which is not very good quality, I’ve now brought a camera back from the UK and worked out how to hook it up, so can make videos of a rather higher quality, at least in picture if not in sound. I have to be honest, it’s much, much easier just to use my laptop, but if better quality pictures will encourage people to come, happy to commit to that!

So, any other comments gratefully received! Can’t promise to act on all of them, but really like the idea of daily videos incorporating a Bible reading and prayer encouraging all Christians in their walk with God. Very much hope that we are working towards a point where we spend rather more than 1 minute a day to read the Bible and pray – but, if this is the starting point, or a supplement to other things, fantastic!

So, not sure in my own mind whether this is a viable long term project. If you’ve subscribed but do not come each day, would be really helpful if you could unsubscribe and tell me why. If you think this is a good idea then please vote with your feet. At all times, in all things, to God be the glory!