Drag and Drop Your Prayers

Guideposts blogger Rick Hamlin considers a high tech form of prayer: drag and drop. It’s bound to provide relief from worry.

The drag and drop approach to prayer for relief from stress and worry.

It’s one of my favorite features on the computer. I can still recall the excitement when I first did it way back in…1997? The drag and drop feature. You position the mouse over a document or something you’ve highlighted and then you drag it to a folder or wherever it needs to go.

Isn’t that a perfect feature to use in prayer?

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Consider all those thoughts that careen through your head when you’ve got your eyes closed, praying. Imagine them as files on your computer. Some might be documents with tens of thousands of pages (all those worries that weigh you down).

Now imagine taking the mouse of your faithfulness and dragging those documents into a folder. You might already have one in your mind’s eye that’s labeled “to be looked at later,” a folder of endless postponement, a cave of evasion.

Or maybe you have one that reads “scabs and wounds to be picked at endlessly.” It may contain documents of emotional wounds, ancient sorrows, resentments, grudges.

You can keep adding to those folders all you like, but they’re not going to get any prettier with age. Fact is, they’ll probably get uglier and gamier the longer you hold on to them.

Why is it that we cling so long to folders that we’d best be rid of? Why not let your prayer mouse hover over useless folders like that and drag them to the best and biggest folder of all, the “all for God” folder?

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I picture it right at the center of my prayer screen, the God folder–ready to receive everything that lives in any other folder that we’ve got hidden elsewhere on our screen–even that trash basket at that bottom.

During your prayer time, drag and drop. Drag the endless “to-do” list into it as well as the “can’t-ever-get-done” list.

Don’t linger over the “worry” files but just drop and drag them into the God folder.  You’ll find that your prayer mouse is as powerful as a moose. Amazing, the loads it can haul away.

You can tell yourself while you’re at it, “God, please take care of that” or “God, look after this” or “God, I don’t even understand what I’m feeling about this so I’m giving it to you.”

Watch the folder fill up. Feel yourself loosen up. Then sit in silence a while longer and see if there’s anything else pending. Drag and drop it.

Then click on your “open my eyes” button. Doesn’t the world look a little better? Aren’t you ready to face the day? The Spirit will be doing the work of hard drives and soft drives, the gears clicking a million miles a minute. You have dragged and dropped everything into the right place.

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