I’m beginning to think my least favorite letter in the alphabet is E, but that’s only because I’ve seen it a bit too much lately. There I was, driving one of my kids to work in a vehicle that was parked in the driveway, emptied of gas by her sibling, yet again.

Oh, the frustrations of being a single car family –our second vehicle recently bit the dust– and oh the frustrations of realizing half-way where you need to be that you probably don’t have enough gas to get there. Fortunately, we weren’t going too far, and there was a gas station across the road from my daughter’s workplace.   Even though this was not my station of choice, I was able to drift there on fumes,  put a few dollars worth of gas in the tank. then drive to the preferred gas station and fill ‘er up. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Truthfully, there are times, when my spiritual tank is on empty, that I only have time to pray briefly, putting just enough fuel in the tank to get me by until I can “fill ‘er up”– more often than I care to admit. At times like that I have to remind myself that Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, in  Greek, means to pray without intermission. Paul wasn’t speaking of super-lengthy prayers, nor was he speaking of praying every minute of every day; he was merely encouraging his brethren to pray frequently, never letting long gaps develop in their prayer life.

What about you, dear reader, do you ever feel like you are running on empty, and cannot find enough time to pray as long as you would like, for whatever reason? What we all need to remember is that it’s not so much the quantity of time spent in prayer that matters; it is the quality. Let us, therefore, make every minute count!