When Your Mind Wanders

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” — Isaiah 26:3 (KJV)

You close your eyes to pray. Ten seconds later you are thinking about lunch, then a conversation from yesterday, then a song, then whether you replied to that message. Then you remember you were praying, and feel guilty. Sound familiar?

Someone wrote to Brother Lawrence with exactly that problem. His reply begins with a sentence that should make you breathe out:

“You tell me nothing new; you are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts.”

It was not new to Lawrence either. Beaufort says that at the beginning Lawrence often spent his whole prayer time “rejecting wandering thoughts, and falling back into them.” He admitted that “useless thoughts spoil all.” The saint in the kitchen had the same jumpy mind as you.

So what did he advise? First, keep your prayers simple. “Many words and long discourses,” he wrote, are “often the occasions of wandering.” Instead, he gave a picture: “Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man’s gate.” A beggar like that can’t make speeches. He just stays there, in front of the one who can help.

Second, don’t panic when your mind drifts. This is the key piece of advice:

“Trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility.”

In other words, getting angry with yourself just adds another distraction. When you notice you have wandered, don’t scold. Calmly turn back. Then do it again. And again. That turning back is the prayer.

Third, and this is clever, practise during the rest of the day. He wrote: “One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquility, is not to let it wander too far at other times.” If you only think of God for five minutes a day, those five minutes will be hard. If you are turning to him often through the day, your prayer time will feel more like continuing a conversation than starting a cold one.

Your mind will wander. Everyone’s does. The question is not whether you drift, but whether you come back. God is not annoyed by your hundredth return. He is glad you came back.

One thing to do this week: in your prayer time, don’t try to fill it with lots of words. When your mind wanders, simply say “back to you, Lord” and carry on. Count how many times you come back, and thank God for each one, not against yourself.