I read this on a friend’s Facebook post:
“Practice the Pause. When in doubt – pause. When angry – pause.
When tired – pause. When stressed – pause. And when you pause –
Pray.”
It was attributed to Roma Downey, but whoever first spoke this – absolutely terrific! It does give us a basis to respond proactively and not re-actively. Quite honestly, we do need to practice in order to properly and effectively respond to doubt, anger, tired, and stressed. However, one can never take a ‘time out’ in life to experiment with various reactions to a situation. What we can do is to be aware of how we responded and what the ramifications and repercussions were.
The world in which we live is fraught (always wanted to use this word) with so many distractions and obstacles to our goals that we need to have not just coping mechanism we can rely on, but a proactive method to face them. The last word in this post is the answer – Pray. Because praying causes us to slow down, to center on Who provides our answers, and discover that what we are pursuing is what we should be focusing on.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a ‘project’ and suddenly wondered if it was ‘worth it’? Or maybe you were in the midst of a very frustrating conversation that no one seemed to understand what the other was saying nor did they seem to want to focus on understanding and resolution. We’ve all been in these situations and have wanted to ‘just get it over with’ except we knew we’d have that to deal with as well.
Doubt, anger, tired, and stress can attack at any moment. Sometimes they double up and two or three occur simultaneously. Reality often seems to indicate that we respond in kind or we respond unthinkingly because of our own ‘condition’. This is an even greater encouragement that we need to practice the answer of prayer in less stressful situations so that we ‘automatically’ go into a pray mode when the greater stress occurs.
Practice. We really need to practice the pause. Pausing really may turn a disaster into a triumph. However, without practice it probably won’t. I would recommend that we start with the easier times so that when the difficult times come, we are more proficient. Practice. This leads to a habit that promotes and protects and resolves the seeming unresolve-ables… because we started with the pause of prayer.
