By Libi Clifford
GOLF AND PRAYER have a lot in common. In both, everyone is only too happy to tell you how you can become more skilled and better set yourself up for success.
We all know that the best way of getting better at anything is to practice it and that once a week practice isn’t enough. Once a week won’t do anything for your golf or your prayer life. You won’t get noticeably better at either without frequent practice.
Playing golf and praying both offer many options for practice. You could play golf more often, take lessons or go to a driving range and use the clubs that give you the poorest results. Prayer practice might be very similar. You could pray more often, read and try out different prayer practices or practice the parts of prayer which you don’t feel you do well. Maybe you haven’t tried to concentrate often enough to feel comfortable with meditation or you need practice organizing your thoughts.
Golf offers you many club options. Pro golfers can have up to 14 clubs in their golf bag. Each one is for a specific distance and circumstance. The rest of use fewer- just the clubs that give us the best results. How many prayer practices can you name? Not surprisingly, I stopped counting at 14. The bigger question is how many are you comfortable using? Maybe you like following the rules of a prayer style. Maybe rules get in the way of your prayer. In the end, the best prayer style for you is the one that gives you the best conversation with God.
Conversation is how I look at prayer. I want to know God better and to me the best way of getting to know someone is to talk with them. Talking is often how I organize my thoughts about my faith, beliefs and the world around me. I do that through prayer. God seems to listen patiently and then sometimes days later offers the question, “Are you sure, maybe this is truer?”. If I listen, I learn more about God and what he thinks is important for me and that inspires me to pray more often. Like golf, practice in prayer is the key.
Libi Clifford is an AFP Executive.