Praying night and day

"… I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day" (2 Timothy 1:3).

Paul said that kind of thing to many people (Philippians 1:3-4; Colossians 1:3, Philemon 1:4, etc.). His claim to pray for so many churches and individuals caught my attention because I also have a slew of folks I want to pray for-and folks I have told I would pray for. But in order to have enough time to kneel down and pray for all of them, I would have to be on my knees all day.

I get frustrated trying. How did Paul do that! Mathematically speaking, I conclude he must have prayed all day long. And since we all need to go to work, and go food shopping, and pay bills, and maybe play the guitar, then we can't be praying all day long.

Or can we? The only logical way I can figure that the Apostle Paul managed to do all the traveling and preaching and writing he did, while not neglecting praying for Tim and Titus and Philemon and others, was to pray on the fly. He must have done just what he described to the Philippians in the third verse of chapter 1, praying for them "at every remembrance," whenever they came to mind.

I like that idea. I don't have to fit in every Tom, Dick, and Harry into my 45-minute morning prayer walk. The ones I don't get around to will come to mind in the course of the day, as I'm sailing to Antioch or standing on a soapbox in Athens. (Or, more likely, as I'm sorting socks.)

The "night and day" approach to praying has other benefits as well. If a "night and day" method becomes our style, then we are always in a state of readiness to pray, and we are always positioned in the spirit realm. Names and faces that come to mind will be our prompts to lift them up to God, rather than to entertain evil thoughts of resentment or covetousness.

It is pretty cool that even in the "throwaway" comments of Paul we find a wealth of meaty spiritual marrow.