Over the years I’ve taken many personality tests for work.  As the executive director of various agencies I always used them as a tool for team-building, as well as coaching and supervision.  Without fail, every test has determined that I am distinctly not a “people person.”  The results always show that I am task-oriented, rather than people-oriented, which means that before I can focus on anyone around me I have to finish whatever tasks are on my plate for the day.  Nothing personal, I just need to cross certain things off my list before I can give you my undivided attention.  Otherwise, I get very antsy and start mentally trying to complete the task in my head while you’re talking.  And the more tasks accomplished in a day, the better I feel.

I think this is one more explanation for why prayer is so hard for me.  It does not feel very productive.  I want so much to pray, yet I sit there feeling both uneasy and antsy, waiting for the time when I am done and get back to the work at hand.

So I was thrilled to learn that I was not alone in this sentiment.  Lauren Winner, in her beautifully crafted book Girl Meets God, writes the following:

“I have a hard time praying.  It feels, usually, like a waste of time.  It feels unproductive; my time would be better spent writing a paragraph or reading a book or practicing a conjugation or baking a pie.  Sometimes, whole weeks elapse when I hardly bother to pray at all, because prayer is boring; because it feels silly (after all, you look like you’re just sitting there talking to the air, or to yourself, and maybe you are); but above all because it is unproductive.  As Jo once put it, “If you spend a day in prayer, you cannot, at the end of the day, point to a pile of toothpaste tubes you made and say, that is what I did today.”  Still, there are the weeks when I do pray, the weeks when I trust – or, at least, manage to act like I trust – that prayer does something, even if it is something I cannot see.”

So part of the challenge for me is not just overcoming my dis-ease with prayer, it is also challenging my sense that praying is unproductive.  Certainly, if you asked me, I would tell you that praying to God is a very productive thing to do.  It is producing a relationship between the person and God.  It is producing a change in the pray-er.  It is producing results for the people for whom the prayer is being said.  Indeed, there is a whole lotta producin’ goin’ on, so to speak. 

I can tell you that.  But, clearly, I don’t feel that praying is being productive.  At least not yet. 

I’ll have to work on that. . .