15 minutes. That’s the amount of time it takes to make macaroni and cheese, drive to Trader Joe’s, or to help a four year old decide what she wants to wear to preschool. It takes 15 minutes to eat breakfast, call your parents, or tie a tie (if you wear one as infrequently as I do). 15 minutes is the amount of time you save watching Survivor if you tivo through the commercials.

Most things we either (a) have to do or (b) do because we enjoy them take more time than that. Yet for many of us, 15 minutes is more time than we take each day to meet God in prayer and Scripture. If that is the case should we really be either surprised or disappointed if our spiritual lives are less than robust? If God doesn’t seem quite as knowable or accessible as we’d like? If prayer doesn’t seem to “work” as we’d expect?

Prayer stands at the heart of the spiritual life, and this fall our focus is on learning from Jesus how to pray. As we look at the Lord’s Prayer on Sundays, I’m inviting/challenging you to commit yourself to practice what we learn (why learn it if we aren’t going to do it?). To use the prayer Jesus gave us as a framework and commit to 15 minutes a day connecting to God (if you haven’t signed up and want to just hit reply). (The open secret in this: regular, consistent time with God undergirds our entire spiritual lives. And if we regularly give 15 minutes to this crucial activity, we find ourselves wanting more.)

As we dive into this as a community, we’ll be making some space for discussion on facebook as well (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Torrance-CA/Life-Covenant-Church/164592434993?ref=ts) and looking to learn from one another as we go.

And I want to give a big thanks everyone for your prayers for Bridget and Marcos. You can get updates from them by logging onto http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/bridgetandrade/

Lord bless you friends, and we’ll look forward to seeing you this weekend –

Tim
Mt 6:33