A Prayer
My Father, I want to be a man of discernment. I want to be a man thoroughly committed to acting on your will as I discern it. But I know that that means I must be committed to nurturing a spirit of patience and quietness in myself — a quietness that is not overridden by an undue sense of urgency.
I confess, Lord, that my foolish habit of procrastination causes me to operate very often out of an undue sense of urgency — an urgency of my own making. My own procrastination causes me to often to live too close to the time of decision, and so deprives me of real or perceived time for listening, reflecting, confirming, refining.
Please, forgive me for this foolish, unstewardly, and stubborn habit. Please, free me from it.
“Our friendship with God is sustained in prayer, and it is in prayer that we encounter the will and purposes of God and allow God to speak to our wills, our motives, our diseases, and our priorities.” Gordon T. Smith, Listening to God in Times of Choice: The Art of Discerning God’s Will, pg. 21.
“We must take steps to channel our interests, our passions, and our desires into paths of importance and ways of blessing. We should seek the kingdom [of God] — with passion.” Stuart Briscoe, Time Bandits: Putting First Things First, pg. 37.
© 2009 Gary A. Chorpenning
Gary Chorpenning's Notebooks 
Gary,
This is awesome. Procrastination is something that so many of us are guily of and such and easy thing to fix! You have challenged me to look at myself in this area.
Blessings,
Erin
LikeLike
This helps me to learn to be more productive in prayer when I can see how a concise and goal oriented request is presented. I see how you tell of the desire to develop a quality -listening, and knowing which fruit of the spirit will help – patience.
Then a confession of a current state-urgency, a request for forgiveness and a plea for transformation.
I too, often feel a sense of urgency. I like your phrase ” live too close to the time of decision”. This reminds me of my time of major transformation and a call to action when it really hit me that Christ could return at any given time. Am I ready? Are my loved ones ready? What difference can I make? Those thoughts give me an extreme sense of urgency. This is something I definitely can’t procrastinate on, but I have to slow myself down, or better yet I need to keep asking Him to give me a sense of quiet and peace.
LikeLike