Meditation has enhanced David Raddings’ prayer life

Prayer is highly important to me, providing a meaningful connection with God and an opportunity for honest sharing. It enables conversations about the good, bad and other topics on my mind, heart and soul.

My method of prayer began as most Christians’ do, with eyes closed and head down. I found this to be a perfect way to pray and practised this style of prayer for years and still do to this day. When I was a student at university, one of my friends introduced me to meditation. A group of us decided that each one of us would do 30 minutes a day for 30 days straight over lockdown. I was a little apprehensive at first, but I was asked to try it and there couldn’t be any harm in trying. At the end of the 30 days, I really appreciated the time I took to stop, breathe and cut all the distractions out. I really enjoyed this. It made me feel refreshed as life can be stressful, so having time to step back and put my worries to one side for those 30 minutes was great.

I was worshipping and praying in the same way until I started reading the news, and understanding how sad the news has been, especially over the last few years. For me, there has been a lot of sadness and pain across the world and I feel helpless. This led to me thinking about how I prayed. It didn’t feel right for these situations that will affect real people. I started to look into ways to pray that would help me voice everything to God…

Daniel Raddings is a member of the URC Yorkshire Synod

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This is an extract from an article published in the April 2023 edition of Reform

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