Are you ever reluctant to pray? Most of us have been there. Listen to John Newton: ‘I find in my own case an unaccountable backwardness to pray... my carnal heart is apt to start away from it.’
Hamish MacKenzie would agree: ‘One might think that... we should want to pray; indeed that we should be irresistibly impelled to pray. But how often have we had to drive ourselves to it! And how often this holy intercourse has been scamped or omitted! We remember days when we could hardly bear to enter our study... to pray.’
Thomas Shepard, the New England Puritan, puts it even more strongly: ‘There are times in my life when I would rather die than pray.’
And C. S. Lewis makes no bones of it: ‘Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.’
