A headline caught my eye this week: the CEO of Golden Corral talking about a prayer habit that has guided him for forty-one years. Not a crisis prayer. Not a foxhole prayer. A habit. Something he has kept doing, week in and week out, through promotions and setbacks and whatever a restaurant company throws at a man across four decades.
What struck me was not the length of it, though forty-one years of anything is worth noticing. What struck me was the ordinariness. Nobody hands out awards for that. There is no moment where the music swells. It is simply a man who decided, early, that he was not going to make decisions alone — and then kept that decision when it stopped being exciting.
Most of life is not the dramatic part
We love the lightning-bolt stories. The Damascus road. The sudden healing. And I believe in those — I have watched God move suddenly in a room, and I expect Him to do it again. But if you look honestly at the shape of a life, the dramatic moments are a handful of pages in a very long book. The rest is Tuesday.
The rest is the shift you have to work, the email you have to answer, the kid who needs picking up, the payroll that has to clear. And the question that decides the direction of a life is not what you do on the mountaintop. It is what you do on Tuesday.
Solomon put it plainly: "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths" (Proverbs 3:5-6).
Notice the phrase — in all thy ways. Not in your religious ways. Not in your Sunday ways. All of them. The budget meeting is a way. The hiring decision is a way. The conversation you are dreading is a way. Acknowledging God there, in the actual traffic of your week, is not a small spiritual add-on. According to Solomon, it is the thing that keeps a path straight over decades.
A habit is a decision you only have to make once
I have spent a lot of my life leading people — in business before the church, and in the church now — and here is something I see in both places. The people who are steady are almost never the people with the most willpower. They are the people who built something they no longer have to argue with themselves about.
If you decide every morning whether to pray, you will lose that argument a fair number of mornings. Some days you will be tired. Some days you will be angry at God. Some days the calendar simply wins. But if prayer is already where your feet go — if it happens at a certain hour, in a certain chair, on a certain drive — then you get to bring your tired self and your angry self into God's presence instead of skipping the visit altogether.
That matters, because the honest days are often the fruitful ones. A habit is what gets you in the room on a day you would not have chosen to come.
What the Spirit does with a repeated ask
Here is the part I would not want you to miss. This is not just self-discipline dressed in church clothes. Something happens in a person who keeps asking. The Holy Spirit is not a doctrine we hold at arm's length; He is a Person who is present and at work, shaping what we want. People who pray over their work for years start to notice things. They catch the nudge to make the phone call. They sense when a decision that looks good on paper is wrong in the room. They become harder to flatter and quicker to forgive.
That is not magic and it is not a formula. Nobody is promising you that a prayer habit will make you a CEO. Plenty of faithful, praying people have carried disappointments they never asked for, and prayed prayers that were not answered the way they longed for. If that is you, hear me: your asking was not wasted, and you are not a lesser Christian for the outcome. God is forming something in you that does not show up on a balance sheet.
Start something small tonight
Somebody reading this is twenty-two and wondering where to begin. Somebody is seventy-two and thinking they missed the window. Neither of you did. Forty-one years began with one ordinary day of asking.
Our Bible Study meets tonight at 6:30, and I would say the same thing about that gathering that I would say about a daily prayer: the power of it is not in any single evening. It is in the returning. Week after week, a handful of people open Scripture together and let God do slow work — and slow work is still God's work.
Jesus did not wait for us to build an impressive habit before He came for us. He came while we were still inconsistent, still forgetful, still starting over. That is the grace underneath every habit worth keeping — you are not praying your way into His favour. You are simply walking, one ordinary day at a time, with Someone who already decided to walk with you.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.