Oh Jesus, come. The world groans for you.

The streets are bloody and the debts are rising. There are riots all around, anxieties about the future, 72-day marriages, 5th grader suicides, political stalemates, crashes of every sort, too-high heating bills, faucets that don’t work, pencils that smear instead of erase, milk that goes sour, teeth that get cavities, and cancer that keeps coming back.

Messiah, come.

Come and bring justice to the perpetrators of evil: The dictators who oppress, the pedophiles who abuse, the rich who swindle, the thieves and murderers and liars and cheaters and addicts… Basically, all of us. Judge us, refine us, renew us oh Lord. Cast our sins into the depths of the sea. Show your faithfulness to us oh God, as you did to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

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I don’t love reading the Bible. There: I said it. In fact, I’ll go further: I struggle to make myself read Holy Scripture, and when I do read it, it usually leaves me cold. Far from being a sweet experience of encountering God, reading the Word often makes me a bit depressed, because I think “Is this it? I’m not feeling profoundly impacted by the Word... I guess I must be defective.”

Let me be clear about doctrine. I believe that the Bible is the written Word of God, inerrant, inspired by the Holy Spirit. I know how important it is for Christian formation. I know that in these pages, it’s possible to have a life-changing encounter with God through the Holy Spirit.

I just have a really hard time reading it.

Part of the problem may be the weight of impossible expectations.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Paul gives us a bracing challenge: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Pray without ceasing! How do you even get started?

There are many ways to approach the idea of constant prayer, but one way is through the ancient spiritual discipline called praying the Daily Office. There are a number of different Offices, but the easiest ones for modern working people are Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer.

The Daily Office is a structured yet flexible format for prayer, offering a “backbone” of Scripture readings combined with a framework of traditional written prayers (most of which draw specifically on Scripture verses for their language), with “space” built in for extemporaneous, personal prayer. By making choices about what to include and what to skip, each individual can personalize the Daily Office to fit different preferences and amounts of time, from 15 minutes to... however long you want to pray!

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