For a year or two I worked at the Starbucks in my hometown. It was a decent job for the most part but there was one aspect that killed me: 4:30am wake-ups for the morning shift. I'd also just finished my first ministry job. In my first year of ministry, every day of prayer felt like an opportunity to hear God say something life changing but in second year, prayer started to feel like a bundle of unmet expectations I unloaded on a God who didn't have much to say. 4:30am wake ups were killing my body but before that my soul had been long dead.

I called my spiritual director (whose fantastic little ebook on the spiritual disciplines I'm going to shamelessly plug - you can download it for free here) and explained that prayer was starting to feel more draining than life giving. His advice was to start my day with an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be and be on my way.

At first I just thought that he was flat out wrong. My understanding of pre-written prayers was that they were for children, prayer beginners, or people who didn't have a "personal relationship with Jesus." Substituting my conversational style of prayer with spiritual basics didn't feel like growth, it felt like a regression. I tried it for a little while but instead of noticing growth, I just felt guilty for not doing prayer the way I had always done.

Though I had not yet fully grasped it, pre-written prayers are not just for spiritual beginners. They're for the exhausted, the deconstructing, and the wounded. I'm not saying that they're better than contemplative or conversational prayer but that there is a goodness to them that we miss out on if we treat them as "less than."

The gift of pre-written prayer is that it doesn't require us to create and sustain a kind of emotional state for them to do something in us, they just do whether we recognize it or not. If our prayer lives are centred only around forms of prayer that require creativity and emotional energy, we run the risk of building our spiritual lives on our effort alone rather than on God's with our participation.

Pre-written prayers remind us that He is the primary initiator of prayer, not us. That line from Romans says it beautifully: "the Spirit helps us in our weakness." When we don't have the strength to make our prayers do something, the Spirit uses our prayers to do something to us.

In my season of physical and spiritual exhaustion, I noticed that unlike the forms of prayer I was used to, pre-written prayers (mainly the Liturgy of the Hours in my own life) took me at whatever emotional state I was in. I could be joyful and at peace or distracted and exhausted but the result at the end was the same: a sense of stability and connection with the Spirit of God that I hadn't had before. God was doing something to me, even if I couldn't recognize it in the moment.

God always has something for us in prayer. Conversational, emotional, and contemplative prayer are huge gifts and I hope that all of us are able to enter into them throughout our lives. At the same time, there are seasons where it feels like we have nothing to talk about, feel, or contemplate. Even in those times, God wants to give to us, even if it means letting the words someone else has written pray in and for us.