Two of my younger friends were together when Brittany heard Carrie say something, but she couldn’t make it out.

“What’d you say?” Brittany asked.
“Nothing,” Carrie said.

A short while later, it happened again. Brittany heard Carrie speak, but she couldn’t hear what Carrie said. Once again, Carrie said it was nothing.

The third time it happened, Brittany said, “Okay, I know you just said something.”

And that’s when Carrie explained that she was tweeting God. “You know,” Carrie said. “Sometimes you can’t really go into a long prayer, but something or someone crosses your mind and you just toss up a prayer. I call that tweeting God.”

Ok. I get that. I tweet God. I just didn’t know to call it that. Maybe you tweet God, too. That’s fine. I mean, it’s better than fine, unless tweeting God is all we do, and then, well, it’s not so good. Let me explain.

Every believer is familiar with the Biblical call to “be still and know that I am God” but it’s not easy to build our lives around regular dedicated stretches of prayer.  Let me rephrase that. It can be downright hard and frustrating to spend quality time praying, at least until the Spirit of God within us begins to teach us how to tarry, and then it’s easy peasy, right?  Wrong!

We can learn and experience the blessing of prayer and it can still be challenging to draw aside when the noisy world is pressing in on all sides and the to-do list is mounting. Or, how about when we feel particularly fallen and unforgiven, despite our whispered pleas for mercy. Anybody else familiar with those times when the heavens seem closed for business and your mind is wandering all over creation, or is it just me? Yeah, I thought so.

The truth is that learning to pray beyond the occasional tweet doesn’t come easy. By tarrying in prayer, we’re saying that this stretch of time the world might consider us as wasting, is anything but squandered minutes and hours we can’t get back. It’s us, acting on our belief that prayer is a lifetime investment that builds and brings dividends, plants, sows, and harvests.

This kind of prayer, this tarrying prayer, will always come with a price. Learning to see the value in what it costs, however, and experiencing the results of slowing ourselves down to listen for God, this will make us seek our prayer closets over and over again. For over the course of countless struggles to corral our thoughts and express our hearts, we finally begin to understand that these times of prayer that might not seem to be changing anything around us the way we hoped, are changing things in us in ways we never dreamed. True transformation is happening in the way we think, the way we live, and the way we love.

In prayer, regular tarrying prayer, we’re living out our belief that life is more than the noise around us. And in reaching beyond the twenty-four seven pull of what we can see, who we are and what we want is being changed by One who is unseen.  Yes, even struggling stumbling prayer.

So, let’s tweet God, it’s a good thing. But, let’s also tarry. “Waste” some time with God today and tomorrow. You’ll never live to regret it. Until next time, may the Good Lord bless you and keep you, make His face to shine upon you, and give you peace. This is Shellie with hugs for all~