Imaginative Prayer: Switching Up the Prayer Routine

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Does your summer bend the rules a bit? In our house, bedtimes become a little fuzzier, trips to the pool cut piano practicing short, and french fries count as a vegetable at cookouts. The ambling summer months feel expansive, and spending time outside on long sunny days gives one plenty of "scope for
imagination," as Anne of Green Gables would say.

Imagination is always available, of course, but sometimes the leisure of summertime reminds us how creative we can be. Slow days ease the rigidity of lock-step schedules, and imaginative play breathes life into our family activities. Suddenly that pile of leftover mulch becomes a human ant hill. A bucket of water becomes a stew, flavored with rock-onions, twig-carrots, and maple-leaf-spices. My brothers and I always pretended the cracks in our driveway were cavities in a giant's tooth, and we (newly appointed dentists) had to clean out all the gravel with sticks before the giant's anesthesia wore off. Ah, summer!

Call me crazy, but one of my favorite summer activities is hanging laundry out on the clothesline. While I do hang out some things in the middle of the Wisconsin winter, I delight most heartily in airing summer laundry. I love cleaning out closets and watching all the freshly washed clothes playing lazily in the wind. Maybe this summer, maybe this very day, our prayer lives could use a similar freshening up.

If we clean out the closet that is our prayer life, we can bring all our prayer habits out into the sun for inspection. Surely we'll find some beautiful memorized prayers we call to mind daily, like the Our Father or the Morning Offering. Many of us also like to pray spontaneously, in our own words, at random moments throughout the day. Maybe some of us like to pray with Scripture, or with music. Some talented people I know pray while creating beautiful things: art, beadwork, furniture, handbags. But how many of us use our imagination to pray?

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       www.apostleshipofprayer.org

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