1. SWEET HOUR OF PRAYER
1. SWEET HOUR OF PRAYER
--by Dr. Ralph L. Byron, Jr.
I was in my surgical-resident training in Berkeley, California, when I first began to think seriously about prayer. It was wartime, 1942. I knew that shortly I'd be going overseas, leaving my wife for many months. I wished I could be going into it with a strong prayer life. I went to the library and took out every book I could find about men for whom God had been a pulsing, living reality - biographies of Martin Luther, John Wesley, S.L. Moody, John Calvin, and others I discovered that every one of those men had prayed at least an hour each day.
Could I, starting here and now, spend an hour every day praying? As a resident surgeon, I had to be at the hospital and on the wards at 7:00 each morning. I rarely finished work before midnight. Where in the schedule like that could I find a spare hour? Not at bedtime certainly. I was too tired to stay awake. Not during the overcrowded hospital day. Only the early morning was left so I set the alarm for 5:30 instead of 6:30.
The night before I began, I put the alarm clear across the room so I'd have to get out of bed to shut it off. In what seemed but a moment the alarm went off. I felt my way out into the dark living room. I switched on the light, knelt down in front of the sofa and started to pray. I prayed for my family, friends, patents, the other doctors at the hospital, doctors at other hospitals, doctors who didn't have hospitals, our country, our enemies, our soldiers, their soldiers, and all the missionaries I knew. At last I looked at my watch. Only 20 minutes had gone by. I went back over the whole list in more detail, and at last 60 minutes crawled past. I was exhausted.
At noon in the hospital's operating room I felt enormously sleepy. However, I did not fall asleep, and it was a surprisingly good day. When the alarm went off at 5:30 the next morning, I was really tired. It was much tougher than the first morning.
At the end of two weeks I took inventory. Somehow, after the first two or three days, I seemed to feel wider awake on five hours' sleep than I'd been on six. My work at the hospital had gone well. I decided to continue the prayer time.
Week by week, God was not only becoming real to me, He was becoming the meaning in all reality, and the hour which had started out seeming so long now became more and more precious. My whole life, in fact, was different, and I knew the investment of time was paying off.
Eight months after I began my prayer experiment, I got a call to duty with the Marine Corps. A group of us arrived for basic training at Camp Pendleton. I stood in the door of the barracks looking down the rows of double bunks where 10 doctors and 45 line officers would be sleeping. When and where would I find a quiet hour for prayer?
That first day at dawn we marched on a 10-hour hike over the baking San Diego hills. All the way I was telling myself that I could pray in bed just as well as out of it, that God looked at hearts, not knees. We were almost back in camp when I realized that it wasn't what God thought, but what the men would think, that I was worrying about. Of course, He did not care what position I prayed in. I was the one who cared. I didn't want that roomful of men to see me on my knees. And once I realized that I knew it would be kneel or nothing.
We got back to the barracks after dinner, and the lights stayed on. Finally I mustered all my courage - and got down on my knees and prayed. The barracks had a wooden floor, and I could hear the boots of men passing the bunk on their way to the washroom. Boom, boom, boom - then an abrupt halt as they saw me. Boom, boom - two steps backward to make sure they were seeing correctly. I shut out the sound effects as best I could and prayed like mad. I took some ribbing, but the men began to watch my every move. They were watching to see if what I had really worked.
We were soon shipped to the island of Maui, our unit's first stop on the way to Iwo Jima. It was there that I - who a year earlier would have died at the thought of sharing Christ with the Marines in public - started holding public worship services. We held them in the picture-show area because that was where the 2,000 men gathered night after night to attend the movie. We started 20 minutes before show time. On the first night, 200 made first-time commitments to Christ. Before we left Maui, 510 Marines came to Christ, and the whole attitude, language and actions on the base had changed.
No longer could one say my prayer time had made no difference.
--by Dr. Ralph L. Byron, Jr.
I was in my surgical-resident training in Berkeley, California, when I first began to think seriously about prayer. It was wartime, 1942. I knew that shortly I'd be going overseas, leaving my wife for many months. I wished I could be going into it with a strong prayer life. I went to the library and took out every book I could find about men for whom God had been a pulsing, living reality - biographies of Martin Luther, John Wesley, S.L. Moody, John Calvin, and others I discovered that every one of those men had prayed at least an hour each day.
Could I, starting here and now, spend an hour every day praying? As a resident surgeon, I had to be at the hospital and on the wards at 7:00 each morning. I rarely finished work before midnight. Where in the schedule like that could I find a spare hour? Not at bedtime certainly. I was too tired to stay awake. Not during the overcrowded hospital day. Only the early morning was left so I set the alarm for 5:30 instead of 6:30.
The night before I began, I put the alarm clear across the room so I'd have to get out of bed to shut it off. In what seemed but a moment the alarm went off. I felt my way out into the dark living room. I switched on the light, knelt down in front of the sofa and started to pray. I prayed for my family, friends, patents, the other doctors at the hospital, doctors at other hospitals, doctors who didn't have hospitals, our country, our enemies, our soldiers, their soldiers, and all the missionaries I knew. At last I looked at my watch. Only 20 minutes had gone by. I went back over the whole list in more detail, and at last 60 minutes crawled past. I was exhausted.
At noon in the hospital's operating room I felt enormously sleepy. However, I did not fall asleep, and it was a surprisingly good day. When the alarm went off at 5:30 the next morning, I was really tired. It was much tougher than the first morning.
At the end of two weeks I took inventory. Somehow, after the first two or three days, I seemed to feel wider awake on five hours' sleep than I'd been on six. My work at the hospital had gone well. I decided to continue the prayer time.
Week by week, God was not only becoming real to me, He was becoming the meaning in all reality, and the hour which had started out seeming so long now became more and more precious. My whole life, in fact, was different, and I knew the investment of time was paying off.
Eight months after I began my prayer experiment, I got a call to duty with the Marine Corps. A group of us arrived for basic training at Camp Pendleton. I stood in the door of the barracks looking down the rows of double bunks where 10 doctors and 45 line officers would be sleeping. When and where would I find a quiet hour for prayer?
That first day at dawn we marched on a 10-hour hike over the baking San Diego hills. All the way I was telling myself that I could pray in bed just as well as out of it, that God looked at hearts, not knees. We were almost back in camp when I realized that it wasn't what God thought, but what the men would think, that I was worrying about. Of course, He did not care what position I prayed in. I was the one who cared. I didn't want that roomful of men to see me on my knees. And once I realized that I knew it would be kneel or nothing.
We got back to the barracks after dinner, and the lights stayed on. Finally I mustered all my courage - and got down on my knees and prayed. The barracks had a wooden floor, and I could hear the boots of men passing the bunk on their way to the washroom. Boom, boom, boom - then an abrupt halt as they saw me. Boom, boom - two steps backward to make sure they were seeing correctly. I shut out the sound effects as best I could and prayed like mad. I took some ribbing, but the men began to watch my every move. They were watching to see if what I had really worked.
We were soon shipped to the island of Maui, our unit's first stop on the way to Iwo Jima. It was there that I - who a year earlier would have died at the thought of sharing Christ with the Marines in public - started holding public worship services. We held them in the picture-show area because that was where the 2,000 men gathered night after night to attend the movie. We started 20 minutes before show time. On the first night, 200 made first-time commitments to Christ. Before we left Maui, 510 Marines came to Christ, and the whole attitude, language and actions on the base had changed.
No longer could one say my prayer time had made no difference.
posted by Mondcognito at 9:45 PM
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