Romans 12:12 – Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. (RSV)

One of the most wonderful feelings that I can remember from my childhood days is something that may seem quite trivial to some people, but that has been burned into my memory. In the home I grew up in, we did not have central air conditioning. We had ceiling fans in most rooms, and in my parents' room was a window-unit air conditioner.

During the summer months when it became really hot outside, I well remember complaining about the temperature in the house. Many times I remember coming inside from the heat, or waking up during a hot night and walking into my parents' room to lie on the floor. You see, they often kept the door to their room closed because that one air-conditioner would burn out if it had to cool the entire house. I still can feel that cool air blowing across my body and making the discomfort I had felt melt completely away.

Now that I am all grown up and living on my own, I cannot imagine not having central air conditioning in my home. The thought of relying solely on a small air conditioner to cool my home properly would never even cross my mind.

In our spiritual lives we can use some climate control to keep our spiritual homes comfortable. We can use prayer conditioning. Unfortunately, many times we seem to think a window-unit prayer conditioner, that is, a small prayer here, a prayer of desperation there, or a recital of the Lord's Prayer, is sufficient to sustain the proper temperature in our lives and that things will be okay. Right?

Wrong! Just as our homes require good central air conditioning to maintain proper and consistent temperature balance, so too we use constant prayer in our lives to maintain the proper climate and balance in our lives. As today's scripture says, we must be constant in our prayers.

Let us commit ourselves to daily prayer, and watch for the results. If we do not have that prayer conditioning in our lives, things will definitely get too hot for us to handle.

Prayer: Lord, We pray that You will help us to strengthen our prayer life with You. Give us the constancy in our prayers that we need, and hear our prayers, that they may be answered. Amen.

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