Perhaps you started your morning with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Before you stopped for a bite of lunch, you might have closed your eyes and quickly asked for a blessing over your food.

Maybe you were in your car on the way to an important meeting when the traffic congestion prompted you to ask God to clear the way so that you could be on time. Or it could be that, seconds after you got your body in just the right position for a night’s sleep, you remembered your promise to pray for your co-worker’s ill brother, so you slid out from under the covers and onto your knees.

For some, prayer is a habit introduced to us at an early age by our parents or guardians. We pray because we have been told that it is the right thing to do and feel guilty when we don’t do it. For others, it is a way to come before the Lord at any time to confess, repent, listen, or ask for something for someone else. Whether you pray less than you think you should or more than most Christians have a desire to, most of us fall short of the Scripture’s direction to “pray continually.”

What does it mean to pray continually as we are commanded to do? Origen, an early Church father, tells us in words hundreds of years old, “that the only practical way to meet the commandment is to combine prayer with duties and duties with prayer.”

That might have sounded doable to the people of Origen’s day. Life was, no doubt, much slower then. How do we as busy, distracted, technology-dirven, global, 21st century followers of Christ, apply Origen’s advice today? What exactly is prayer and why should we make such an ongoing,lifelong commitment to it? What,indeed, is in it for us?

Prayer is a supernatural tool created by God. It allows natural human beings to communicate with Him and for Him so that His plans for our lives (which reside in the supernatural) can be brought to fruition in the natural realm.

He can accomplish His plans and purposes on earth and defeat the plans of the devil through us. To put it in other words, prayer is the supernatural vehicle that transports us back and forth between the natural and supernatural realms in order to extract God’s plans for our lives and them into earthly realities.

Supernatural vehicle? Communicate for Him? Accomplish His plans and purposes (and not ours)? Defeat the plans of the devil? Those are ot words normally used to describe what is commonly called prayer. Yes, those very words and their meanings will help us to more clearly see prayer for what it really is -- the center of Christian living.