Prayer as Planning for Our Work

With the perspective of brooding prayer, the Spirit of God turned from an architect to an engineer. An architect is a designer who works from an artist’s perspective; an engineer is a detailer who works with a technician’s precision. Most people are one or the other, either a designer or a detailer. The most creative person I have known, however, combined the two. Ed Wells is best known as the ingenious man who engineered the breakthroughs in succeeding generations of Boeing Aircraft. He is a stickler for details and rigidly obedient to the laws of physics and aerodynamics. Ed brings that same discipline to his avocational love of oil painting. Yet, his art is as creative as his aircraft. In describing his work, he speaks about the precision of planning the design, mixing the colors, and laying out the painting. But once his brush touches the canvas he is set free. Form, line, and color come together in an artistic creation that is very good and very valuable. It all begins with the detailed planning of brooding time.

Between the lines of the Genesis story, we can imagine the mind of the Spirit at work with thoughts of creating order out of chaos, turning darkness to light, and changing emptiness to fullness.

Order is created by a grand ecological design in which everything is connected with everything else and all is centered in God; light is the generating force for living and growing beings; and fullness is the totality of minerals, vegetables, and animal life crowned by human beings created in the “image of God. “

Our work will take on similar designs and dimensions in creative thought during our brooding times when the Spirit moves upon our minds and hearts as He did over the dark waters of the unformed earth. Each morning I lay out my daily work before God and ask that He do His brooding once again so that my plans coincide with the “strategy of the Spirit.” Failure to follow this spiritual discipline takes me into the “strategy of self” which might include plans to attack enemies, ploys for winning against competitors, or patterns of random action without a clear sense of direction.

No matter what the nature of our work, we need to plan in prayer. On a typical day we each face decisions which affect the quality of our work – tasks that are too big for us, people who are too difficult for us, and problems that are too complicated for us. For each of these, we need preventive prayer which gives us a sense of who we are and of where we are going. Planning each day through the discipline of prayer will keep us on track and carry us through the inevitable highs and lows of our daily work.