“Prayer for the Tongue-Tied Pray-er” by Jeff Crosby: 7 Ways to Pray blog series

I first met Jeff Crosby in Singapore at LittWorld, a wonderful gathering for writers, publishers, and graphic designers from around the world. As we shared a jetlagged breakfast together, I soon realized here was a thoughtful and articulate person – a quiet leader with gravitas. I love how he shares how what he once saw as a stumbling block in his life has become a pathway to God. Please take a few moments to read and ponder his words:

I have always marveled at people for whom eloquent and impassioned prayer rolls off the tip of the tongue and out of their hearts with great ease and authenticity. Spontaneous. Joyful. Heart-felt. Genuine.

I’ve long wanted to be among those people.

Though I believe deeply in the importance and the efficacy of prayer, I have never been among that crowd. Instead, I am more often than not tongue-tied, like a singer on the stage who forgets the first lines of a song he’s known all his life and has to start all over again, cheeks blushing, heart chagrined.

But as I have grown older, I’ve accepted my tongue-tied prayer life, like my introverted temperament, as something of a gift and I’ve found life-giving pathways around it that have fostered intimacy with God, and helpful self-reflection.

In her book 7 Ways to Pray, the author Amy Boucher Pye writes instructively to people like me when she introduces the concept of the prayer of examen, originally formulated by St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order. She has carried a specific practice of examen in her family (in her case, on vacations) , in which she, her husband and teenage children daily reflect on the joys and the irritations of their days away from home. “I realized recently that these highlights and lowlights can morph into prayer that helps me understand how I’m relating to God,” she writes. “As I pay attention in my life and look back, with his help, to name the things that brought me joy or frustrated me, I can understand how I’m moving toward or away from him.”

The practice of examen at the end of my days has been a gateway to prayer. In quiet on a walk through the natural world or sitting at my writer’s desk, I reflect on the consolations (what was life-giving) and the desolations (what was life-depleting) in the day I am drawing to a close, and out of that reflection I form a prayer of thanks for the presence of God in the midst of it all. I often carry prompting questions written by friends at the Fall Creek Abbey, Beth and David Booram, such as:

• Where am I experiencing an emerging desire?
• Where might I be carrying a misplaced expectation of God, others, life, or myself?
• What in my life is giving me joy? What is giving me sorrow?

As I consider those prompting questions, I am invited to recognize, reflect, and respond in prayer to the God who loves me unconditionally.

The prayer of examen has been, for me, one of the life-giving avenues for a tongue-tied pray-er. And there are others.

Throughout the global health pandemic, I have prayed the Book of Psalms daily, guided by the devotional reflections of Dane Ortlund, a pastor and writer, through the book In the Lord I Take Refuge. If the examen helps me pay attention to what is stirring in my own soul and my sense of God’s presence (or absence), praying the Psalms helps me realize that there is nothing I am facing that has not been faced by those people of faith who have gone before me. Praying the Psalms “foster[s] communion with God amid all the ups and downs of daily life in this fallen world,” Ortlund writes.

I have found that to be true.

The prayer of examen and daily praying the Psalms have given this tongue-tied, praying believer sacred pathways to communion with God. And I am thankful.

Jeff Crosby is the president and CEO of ECPA, the trade association of Christian publishing in North America. He is the author of The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts, to be published by Broadleaf Books in May of 2023.

Order 7 Ways to Pray here for more ways to encounter God, including lots of resources for small groups.