Now that's a provocative headline! It's true. Yesterday I got whipped by the man in the video who a few years ago was a pound for pound world record holder. His name is Travis Mash and I have the privilege of having him as my fitness trainer. I am not sure whether it motivates him or not but I have a standing $50 "barf bonus" offer. If he works me so hard that I b…., well, you know, then he get's a cash bonus. It's more joke than reality, but if it ever happens I'll sure pay up.
Travis is a fantastic trainer, but I could do most of what he makes me do on my own in the gym. In fact, with a little self-discipline and creativity, I could do in my garage or living room, most of what I do in the gym. Follow me here, I am developing an analogy to prayer. Do you see that I am repeating the phrase "I could do"? I realize I could do a lot of good things on my own, but I don't do them. There is a gap between the knowing I should do something, and actually getting it done. We all have these gaps with some issues in our lives, be it exercise, writing thank you notes, eating right, or spending less that one earns. Some (read "I have done this") try to overcome these knowing-doing gaps with frustrated bursts of self-discipline or infomercial derived motivation. May I ask, how long does that last? We know the answer. Not long. So how do we over come the knowing-doing gap? The answer lies in two things: who we are, and what we have. First, we are created by God as interdependent beings. Simply put, we need other people. Second, because we are interdependent, we must trade what we have for what we don't have. Here's how this plays out with Travis. I know I need to exercise, but don't have the discipline in that area, so I look to Travis for someone who has strength where I am weak. Secondly, I have some discretionary dollars that I can choose to spend to further my goals and close my knowing-doing gaps, so I give some of those dollars to Travis to buy his talent where I lack. Now that I have made the trade, I must activate the trade by placing him on my calendar so that I won't waste my investment.
This relates to prayer in the same way. Let's say, like exercise, we know we should pray, but seem to get distracted, interrupted, or just plain forget what to pray for, until the next time we feel guilty for not doing it. Let's look for somebody with a strength or the willingness to help (a friend who who also wants to pray) and take what we have (time) . We swap by praying for each other, but it costs both of us time, though well spent, so we put each other on each other's calendars. Now we can call each other or show up at a good place to pray on a regular basis. I've done this and it works, but it can get a bit tedious when either of the partners enters into a busy season with work, family or life in general. Sometimes it's hard to schedule even the most reliable of people. This is the problem PrayTel was created to solve. It is not PrayTel's purpose to convince people to pray. We think you are already there. Our job at PrayTel is to help you close the knowing-doing gap on prayer. We do this by making a trade with you, just like we can with a fitness trainer or prayer partner in the examples above. We provide you with a daily call delivered to a phone of your choice at a time of your choice. You pay a small monthly fee, (less than I pay for single hour of fitness training). We provide the relevant content to pray and a moment to pray for it, followed by more content and more moments to pray. At the end you can leave a prayer request to be routed to another user, while another's request is routed to you. You could ignore our calls. You could hang up. Our bet is that our subscribers won't, because they know how important it is to connect with God to pray. We could pray without PrayTel and we hope that we all have been. We also know that these are busy and distracting times, so in these times we are here to help close the knowing-doing gap on prayer.
