Technology can be a boon or a bane.
It can simplify our lives or complicate them. It can bless or curse. It can have our coffee ready before we roll out of bed, but it can also distract us from driving, yielding potentially tragic results.
Among the greatest blessings of technology, however, are the ways it can help us to pray. Here are seven:
1) Set a daily alarm (or two, or more) in your smartphone to remind you to pray. You can even choose a tune such as “Sweet Hour of Prayer” as the alert tone.
2) Subscribe to a prayer podcast. You can listen while driving, walking—or even while falling asleep (your smartphone podcast player may even allow you to set a sleep timer).
3) Use Guideposts’ excellent “OurPrayer” app that allows you to submit prayer requests, create prayer lists, and otherwise energize your prayers with daily Bible verses, reflections and prayers. Parents and grandparents might also try my “31 Ways to Pray for Your Kids” app, which provides 31 beautifully illustrated and Bible-based prayers.
4) Subscribe via email or blog reader to blogs like this one (or my daily prayer blog, which posts a short prayer every morning).
5) If you use electric lamp timers, let them remind you to pray (perhaps even a corresponding prayer, such as Psalm 119:105’s “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path”) when they click on and off.
6) Use Spotify, Pandora or YouTube playlists of music and videos to draw you into God’s presence audibly and visually.
7) Many aromatherapy devices or essential oil diffusers include a timer, so a particular scent can remind you to pray or reinforce your praying like a scented candle or burning incense.
These are just a few ideas, and you probably won’t want to try them all. But if they suggest other ways to pray with technology, then this post will have done its job.
