Pray without Ceasing

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Rejoicing always and giving thanks in all circumstances might not be easy things to do, but I've always thought that they sounded more achievable than to pray without ceasing. How do you pray without ceasing?

I'm giving a talk in October about living a life in relationship with God. Ever since I started to think about the topic, planning what the muscles on the bones of the talk might be, I keep encountering examples I might use or viewpoints that I hadn't thought of. They just appear. In an errant email that was not addressed to me. In music that I didn't choose to listen to. In web sites that I just happen upon. They seem like coincidences.

But...

If I believe that I live a life in relationship with God, and if I believe that he is involved in my life, then I must believe the corollary...that I will see evidence of his work. If I believe in God and in his active work in the world, then I have to believe that there are things that happen which are not coincidences.

I wonder if God opens our hearts, ears and minds to see what is around us that will equip us to do what he has called us to do? I have a friend who asks for prayer for "clear vision." Is that clear vision, or a part of it?

I wonder if being open to this kind of "pointing" by God is part of what Paul meant by praying without ceasing?

From an article an article by Philip Yancey called, "Frederick Buechner's Experience of Crazy, Holy Grace":

"I have intellectual doubts, of course," he says. "But as John Updike put it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent nor the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage."

He writes of an anxious moment in an airport (Buechner battles a fear of flying) when suddenly he notices on the counter a tie pin engraved with his initials, "C.F.B."; and of a good friend who dies suddenly in his sleep and then visits Buechner in a dream, leaving behind a strand of blue wool from his jersey, which Buechner finds on the carpet the next morning; and of sitting parked by the side of the road in a moment of personal crisis when a car barrels down the road with a license plate bearing the simple message "T-R-U-S-T."

Each of these occurrences, Buechner grants, is open to a more "scientific" interpretation. Buechner, though, prefers to see messages in such chance occurrences—of an underlying Providence.