#673. Prayer Closets
If you ever come over to my house for dinner and I ask you to grab something for me from the basement, please know that’s just code for “the closet under the stairs.”
We don’t have a basement, so we call the wicked small space under the stairs our basement. And we call our living room the “office” because that’s where the computer is. And we call our dining room the “playroom” because that’s where the princess dresses are hanging up should you so desire to get your Snow White on.
Our house is a mish mash of rooms pulling double if not triple duty, but I realized recently there’s one thing we don’t have – a prayer closet.
A prayer closet is a small space you go in to pray and focus on the Lord without distractions. I assume that spiritual titans like Billy Graham have prayer closets that have vacuum sealed doors and upon entering them they are completely separated from everything else in the world except God.
I don’t currently have that. In fact, the best way to make sure my daughters play some sort of techno drum & bass solo on a door is to close it while trying to use the bathroom. They have “Whoa, someone is alone” radar and will tap tap tap tap tap tap the night away if you try to get some alone time. That’s why if you want to eat a piece of candy you have to hide yourself in the pantry, and do it in secret. So unless I find a way to tunnel to the magma encrusted core of the earth and establish my prayer closet there, it’s probably not going to happen for me at home.
That leaves me 4 prayer closet alternatives:
1. The Prayer Car
I’ve started to pray more in my car recently thanks to a radio station called “Victory” in Atlanta. Every morning at about 6:05AM the DJ, whose voice is so warm and friendly it makes me feel like he’s wearing an LL Bean sweater and perhaps petting a Golden Retriever while he talks, leads a session of prayers. And hearing him pray kind of kick starts my prayer. So I pray during my commute. I have a prayer car. The only downside is that when someone cuts me off I tend to transformer it into a “swear car.” That’s not great, and definitely wouldn’t happen in a traditional prayer closet.
2. The Prayer Conference Room
I get to work early to do my quiet time so there’s one conference room I’ve turned into a prayer spot. I like to pretend that all of the residual prayer helps the meetings that are held in there later in the day go better. I also like to pretend that when the fire alarm went off one morning at 6:37AM and I was in the middle of a quiet time in a building that was cavernous and empty that I didn’t pee my pants a little bit out of terror.
3. The Prayer Copier
The best place to pray is where you are most often, and me? I’m often at the printer in our building. And I need prayer when I’m there because I’m often tempted to jump my job over everybody else’s print jobs. Seriously? You needed a 97 page PowerPoint printed in color? Two copies? Really? And it is on like donkey kong if I find out you didn’t sort through all the documents when you came to the printer but instead just grabbed a stack and walked away, sorting through them at your desk and throwing mine away when you realized it was mixed in with yours. Plus, you requested an automatic staple be put into your seven page document even though the staple cartridge in the printer has been out of staples for months which causes an error on the machine and traffic jams all the documents that are behind yours. You can’t staple through seven sheets yourself? Seriously, how brittle are your staple muscles? This is why I have a prayer copier, because otherwise I spend all my time at the copier hatin’.
4. The Prayer (C)elevator
That would have been really nice if these points had all started with a C. But it didn’t work and neither do the elevators in our building all that often which is why I pray in them. Sometimes, one of them will skip the floor you requested, as if they’re “so over floor number 5 I don’t even want to stop there anymore.” Some of the elevators in our building refuse to acknowledge your arm as you ram it between doors to hold the elevator for someone and instead try to sleeper hold you in their warm steel embrace. Some of them buzz as soon as the doors close, forcing everyone to look at the heaviest person in the elevator with a look that says, “Thanks, that was probably the ‘prepare to plummet to your death’ buzzer. Way to go.” All of those situations and many more make it easy for me to muster a little prayer in the (C)elevator.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have a prayer closet at home. Until I do, expect for me to be praying in those four places listed above.
How about you, do you have a prayer closet?
Where do you pray?
