When I first learned to pray, I focused on words.

What are the right words?
Am I saying the right things?
Is there some perfect formula that will get the answers I want?

I talked and talked and talked to God. I studied scripture and Jesus’ words about prayer. That’s when I came across Jesus teaching the disciples to pray.

When you pray, don’t babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again.  Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him! 

Matthew 6:7-8 NLT

I took a look at my prayer journal full of words even in the margins and thought, That’s me. I’m babbling. I wondered if God was frustrated like I am when I can’t get a word in edgewise. I was pretty hard on myself until I realized all this one-sided prayer talk I was doing is the first step in learning to pray.

It’s as if in the middle of my praying word after word God gently took both of my hands and said, Stacy… Stacy… look at me. Listen. Are you listening? I know what you need even before you ask. Did you hear me? Just listen…

Prayer begins right where we are with what we know. Picture it more like a child learning to talk. Like language for a baby, prayer is the language of spiritual growth. Babies aren’t born with a full vocabulary, nor do we rise up out of baptismal waters knowing all the things about prayer. For most of us it begins with talking. And if you are like me very little listening.

Truth is I had no idea how to listen to God or what God sounded like. I believed God speaks because the Bible tells us so. But the actual listening was something I learned and am still learning through practice. For me it all began with one minute. One minute of silence before I prayed or read the day’s Bible study. Sixty seconds without expecting anything from God or myself.

The first step is to get comfortable with silence. Start slow. Step into the shallow end. Because talking comes naturally, but listening is a learned skill. It takes a posture of stillness.

I’m not exactly sure how God made the world, but when I read the first part of Genesis a lot happened before God spoke a word.

 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

Genesis 1:1-2 NLT

This is silence. It’s God creating something out of nothing. There are times it has no form I can explain. Some moments feel dark and I find myself drowning in my own thoughts. More often than not I’m tempted to fill the silence with some kind of noise. And yet I sense God hovering, doing something I can’t explain with words or art or music.

In the book Praying Like Monks Living Like Fools, Tyler Staton writes:

Resist the urge to decide if this practice of silent prayer is “working.” Don’t evaluate if you’re “getting anything out of it.” …It’s about giving something of yourself to God, not getting something from God. …Give God the first word, and let spoken prayer follow as a response.

As I take this advice and assume a posture of giving God the first word, I become more and more aware of God’s voice. I hear God’s first words echo in my ears and discover his light is exactly what I need to quiet all the world’s voices and hear the One who boldly proclaims,

“I am the light of the world.”