For the next two or three posts, I’m going to describe some of the ways I spend time ‘in my chair’.

‘In my chair’ is a response to our Pastor’s challenge of a couple of years ago “Where’s your chair?’ It’s simply where and how do I spend time alone with God.
The most important thing is to discover what works for you. I’m sharing here what works for me – I hope you will find it useful!

And if you’ve never done this kind of thing before, start somewhere!
Once a week is better than never, once a day is better than once a week.
But start with something achievable.

I (usually) try to get about half an hour in the morning, and then odd moments throughout the day.
A time with God is a matter of prayer and the Word. Of course, all you really need is a Bible and somewhere quiet. And there have been times when that’s worked fine. But much of the time I need something that holds me accountable – even if only to myself!

This post is all about prayer, which the core of a devotional time. And I have to say, I don’t find prayer easy. Something that’s helped me recently is an app called PrayerMate.

PrayerMate is essentially a collection of lists.
These lists can be created from scratch, or you can import them – I use a mixture of both.
You can then choose whether to pray from these lists every day, or to have them rotate so that you only pray from a certain number of lists each day.
I use a mixture – again!
Every day I use an imported list called Praying the Bible (reduced). This simply gives me a Psalm to read and pray through every day – which is just brilliant! This is pure devotion – expressing emotions, of every shade, to God. It always comes up first which means I think about God first, rather than going straight to me requests.

If you’re wondering – the (reduced) version has one Psalm each day, so goes through all the Psalms every 5 months. The non-reduced version goes through them all in one month. But that’s way too much every day!

My second daily list is Special – for things that need praying for every day.
I’m just working on another list called Quick – where I can quickly jot down things I want to pray about, knowing they’ll be there in my prayer time.
I have five other lists that rotate so that I get three of them every day. They are:
My Walk with God (prayers for my growth)
Family
Friends
Church
World Mission (this is another imported list)

Here are some screenshots

PrayerMate is really flexible. so I can change it every now and then.
(There are also ways a church can create a feed – still looking into that).
The good thing is that all my prayer lists are together.

There are a couple of challenges – firstly the discipline of actually doing it, but that’s the case whatever method I might use; the second is the fact that this is an app. It sits on my phone, which has other apps on it. So there’s another level of discipline, which is to ignore whatever else the phone might be doing to get my attention.

PrayerMate provides a simple and really useful structure. I can come to this and know there will be something for me to pray about, without having to think about it first. And once it’s set up, there are few distractions, so I’m able to focus.

This app has helped me no end. I’ve not used all of its capabilities yet, but what have got is a simple way of keeping my prayer lists in one place, and I am actually praying!

In the next post I want to look at how I spend more time in the Word.