Lauren Gaskill

This might be the last week in our Discovering the Power of Prayer series, but our prayer adventure doesn’t end here. No, our adventure is really just beginning.

During this series, we’ve talked about:

• Understanding prayer on a deeper level — what it is and how it works
• Easy ways to pray more every single day
• How to pray when we don’t know what to say
• Resources to revive your prayer life
• What to do when it feels like we aren’t hearing from God
• The importance of having a dedicated space to pray and how to create a war room
• How to do a prayer walk around your neighborhood

Today, we are taking everything that we have discovered and practiced so far and applying it to a 30-day prayer challenge for the month of November! (If you’re reading this after November, that’s OK! Just join us wherever you are.)

Why a Prayer Challenge?

Now that we’ve gone deeper and learned more about the power of prayer, there is no better way to keep growing than to put it to practice. The following prompts are designed to bring you closer to God over the course of a month of daily devoted prayer. Feel free to edit and change the challenge to fit your prayer needs. All you have to do is click to download this prompt sheet and you can print it for yourself or to give to a friend! I’ve also copied the prompts below if you’d like to reference them from this blog post.

30 Prayer Prompts for Your Prayer Time

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As a swimmer, I don’t claim to be a very good cyclist, but in my early 20s I developed the habit of taking a Saturday morning ride every week during the summer.

While the rest of the world is still asleep, I strap my shoes and helmet on and roll down my driveway with a big smile on my face.

There’s something incredible about being outside when no one else is around.

Because it’s rare for me to see anyone out on the roads before 7 a.m. on a Saturday, you can imagine how thrown off I was this summer to run into the same woman not once, but twice over the course of my ride. I don’t normally stop when people wave to me on my bike, but something was different about this woman and I could feel the Holy Spirit telling me to turn around and meet her.

“Do you ride around here often?” she asked me.

“Well, my husband and I just moved to North Carolina, but you’ll see me out and about almost every Saturday during the summer,” I laughed. “Although I don’t pretend to be any good.”

Come to find out, this woman wasn’t just a believer but a long-time resident of our new hometown. For nearly a half and hour we talked about life and Jesus, and the revival she had been seeing happening around town.

“I’m telling you, Lauren, there is revival happening here,” she said with a fire in her eyes. “Every so often, a group of us go prayer walking around the city and it’s been so powerful to see God at work.”

You know how a dog’s ear perk up when they hear something interesting? Well, I’m not a dog, but if I was that’s what my ears would have been doing when I heard her say “prayer walk.”

I had never participated in, let alone heard of a prayer walk, but I knew I wanted to learn more. So, after our conversation, I raced home to research ideas about how to add prayer walking to my weekly routine. I loved the idea of putting legs to my prayers — of immersing myself in Creation while I talked with the Creator.

Today’s blog post is not a definitive how-to for prayer walking, but instead an inside look at what prayer walks look like for me and how they have impacted my life. My hope for you in reading this is that you’ll be inspired to give this life-giving practice a try sometime soon!

Practical Tips for Your Prayer Walk

What you’ll need: Tennis shoes, weather appropriate clothing, and a mobile Bible app and headphones (optional)

Before you begin: Set a time to prayer walk and add it to your weekly schedule so it becomes a part of your routine. Because I’m a morning person, I like to do my prayer walks on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but you can choose whatever is best for you. Ask God to give you eyes to see and ears to hear what He might want to say to you during the walk.Read More

“Oh! There was something I wanted to share with you … hold on, it’s in my prayer closet … let me go get it!”

And right there, in the middle of our podcast interview, my dear friend and fellow writer, Barb Roose got up to pull a notecard our of her prayer closet.

It was the first time I’d heard about a prayer closet, and it was the first time I gave thought to dedicating a space in my home for prayer.

After we finished recording the interview, I sat down and thought to myself … we have rooms for cooking, eating, sleeping, working, bathing and relaxing, so why don’t we have a room for praying? 

For months, I’d longed to go deeper in my prayer life, and I wondered if creating a space for prayer in my home could help me do just that. Today, my “war room” is the spare room in our home. One corner is for entertainment, one corner is for exercising, and the other corner is for praying.

Some days I simply sit in that corner and wait upon the Lord. Some days I pray the Scriptures. Some days I journal. Some days I press my face to the floor and pour my soul out to God. But whatever the day brings, dear friend I cannot even begin to tell how this practice has made a difference in my prayer life.

Prayer is just as if not more important than all of the other things we do, and it deserves a sacred space in our homes.Read More