In fifteen years of Pastoral ministry, one of the laments that I hear the most from fellow Christians is that they have a difficult time making prayer a daily habit. We know that prayer is one of the fundamental building blocks of spiritual formation. It doesn’t seem to matter how many sermons we hear, or how many books we read on the topic. The prayer life of most Christians, if we are honest, is inconsistent at best. Other than “panic prayers” during desperate times, many of us could say that our prayer life could use a boost.

I wish I could tell you that I have been a “prayer warrior” throughout most of my ministry as a pastor, but that would be a lie. Throughout the years, I have felt a warning light in my spirit tell me that my life of neglecting personal prayer wwould catch up with me. I knew deep down that ministry was unsustainable without prayer because as someone once told me, “You can’t give, what you haven’t first received.” Nevertheless, I pressed on in my own strength and faced burnout on multiple occasions.

In the summer of 2019, I spent a week at Camp Tawakoni in Augusta, KS. I agreed to serve as a small group leader for the high school camp (Omega Camp). The spiritual director at Omega taught us a breath prayer that went like this:

Inhale: You are enough
Exhale: I have enough
Inhale: I am enough
Exhale: For You

We began every morning with a time of personal prayer. We were invited to spend some of our time praying this breath prayer. I started by setting an alarm for five minutes, and I spent that time breathing deeply, letting those words sink into my soul. As I inhaled and exhaled, I imagined myself breathing God’s breath into my lungs, and exhaling all of my fears, anxieties, doubts, failures, and wounds. With every exhale, I felt the tension in my muscles, and in my shoulders slowly release. I felt lighter as I pictured myself falling into God’s arms, trusting God to be enough for me, and believing for the first time in my ministry that I am enough for God, imperfections and all.

I went to Omega camp thinking and praying about how God would work in the lives of the high school students, but I didn’t think that God wanted to work in my life as well. During one chapel time at the end of the week, we were singing a worship song that I had sung many times before. For some reason, the words meant a little more to me on this day. As I internalized the words we were singing, my eyes filled with tears. When my bottom lip began to quiver I knew it was time to leave the chapel. I felt God calling me to go outside so we could “do some business.” God had my attention. It had been a long time since I had cried during a worship song. I grew up in the Pentecostal tradition, so I was no stranger to getting emotional during worship. As I “matured” in my faith through the years, and attended Bible College and Seminary, I took on a faith that was more reasoned and less emotional. I wanted nothing to do with a shallow faith built on emotions and feelings, so I turned to apologetics, theology books, and commentaries as a way to ground myself in a faith that was reasoned. I wanted to have the kind of faith that could answer the questions of an atheist, agnostic, or a teenager questioning their faith.

When I walked out of the chapel at Camp Tawakoni, my eyes were blurry from the tears that seemed to come from out of nowhere. I saw a decorative water well in the memorial garden outside of the chapel, and I walked over to it as if it was calling my name. As I came upon it, I saw that the hole at the top was boarded up, which makes sense because it wasn’t a working well. As I stood at the well, I heard internal voice say to me, “You are like this water well. You have boarded your life up from my Spirit. You have stopped filling your bucket from the well of Living Water.” At this point I had one of those gut-wrenching sobs come over me. God found me at the well, and God called me out, as Jesus did to the woman in John chapter 4.

I stood at the well for a few minutes, so I could compose myself before going back into the chapel. I thought about my week at Camp Tawakoni, and I had this imagery come to mind – these breath prayers acted like a drill or a shovel that had been uncovering and digging out all of the things that I had thrown into the well that was my soul. Unbeknownst to me, these breath prayers had sprung a leak in my spirit until the waters of the Holy Spirit that were pent up all of these years came bursting forth as tears. I felt reborn. I felt cleansed. I felt alive for the first time in a long time. My week at Camp Tawakoni felt like a first breath above water after being held under the surface for a long time.

The practice of breath prayers has revolutionized my prayer time, and I hope that this practice can revitalize or kindle a fire in someone else. There are many ways to pray, but we need to start somewhere.

“Pray as you can, not as you can’t”
- Dom John Chapman

The book of Psalms is the prayer book for God’s covenant people. In it we find honest prayers that express joy, thanksgiving, awe, grief, doubt, fear, and hope. In Psalm 119:1 the Psalmist says, “I have hid your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” Over and over again the Psalmist says that he meditates upon God’s law, love, wonderful deeds, and promises.

The book below is a beginners guide to breath praying through all 150 Psalms. This resource is intended to give you a place to start with your breath prayers. This is a great companion for reading through the Psalms. Simply read a Psalm and then spend 5 or 10 minutes with the breath prayer.

God is a close as the next breath you take. In God, we live, and move, and have our being.

Grace & Peace,
Ben ><>