Livin' Prayer

I’m training for my Camino; I’m hiking the Camino De Santiago in northern Spain—497 miles (13 to 17 miles a day for 34 days) across the northern part of Spain, and I have an app on my phone that encourages me to observe healthy practices like stretching every morning, drinking lots of water, using the stairs instead of the elevator, etc. One of the healthy habits is “relaxation breathing,” which encourages responding to stress by breathing three slow, deep, and intentional breaths. Do you ever think about your breathing? Do you have to think about breathing to do it? The Apostle Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 writes, pray continually (without ceasing). What would it be like to pray without ceasing? What if we thought about praying like breathing: sometimes we focus very intentionally on it, breathing slowly and deeply, cleansing and refreshing our spirit; sometimes we pray rapidly and fiercely as we exercise our spiritual muscles. But most of the time, we could be praying without even thinking about it, taking in the life-giving oxygen of God’s grace, and exhaling the poison of worry, despair, anger, and the like. Unlike breathing, though, spiritual respiration is not instinctual or automatic, until it is because of intentionality.