Praying?

When I started at Westminster I was struck by how often we prayed. We prayed in the morning, we prayed at a lunchtime, we prayed at the start of every class and occasionally we prayed as the day drew to an end. But in the last couple of days I've had two questions asked of me:

1. Have you got anyone praying for you?
2. When do you talk about/get taught about spirituality in college?

And then I looked around me... now we sort of pray in the morning, we still occasionally pray as the day draws to a close, but we are not currently praying at a lunchtime and none of my classes have started with pray so far this term.

Now, prayer and spirituality are not things I find easy or am at times particularly comfortable with. Part of that is my tradition, part of it is where I have been on my journey with God.  However, I see what people are saying: where is the prayer and through what do we come to understanding of our spirituality? Maybe what some would call spirituality, I don't recognise as spirituality. Maybe in what I do on a daily basis is where I learn about spirituality. Maybe spirituality is another one of those fuzzy theological terms that is so hard to define that it is even harder to sit and talk about it specifically. And prayer... well that can be in everything we do, so it doesn't especially mean we have to get down on our knees. But sometimes maybe we do need to get down on our knees!

Now as I have discovered, I fall into the Generation Y group, where spirituality is not a term I may ever truly get my head around. But on the other hand, prayer is something I do get. And if the events of the past week have taught me anything, they've taught me that it is time to get back to the praying.

So my challenge is to pray more, however hard or easy I find it on a daily basis. It is also time to ask others to pray: to pray for the joys and struggles that I face as an ordinand on a daily basis and to pray for a theological college and community, which many hold dearly in their hearts, which faces changing and challenging times.