When you make a habit of listening to God (ALWAYS a great idea), sometimes you will get impressions of his will.

Sometimes you may hear his voice directly.

And sometimes you will experience the prayer of imagination, or imaging prayer, the Holy Spirit guides your imagination in prayer. (If you want to get Latin about it, this is also called kataphatic prayer, the prayer with images.)

Imaging Prayer

Imaging prayer is something that I discovered back in the 1980s in a series of books by the Reverend Morton Kelsey, an Episcopalian priest.

Kelsey was severely depressed. Making it worse, he woke up at 2:00 am every single morning so he wasn’t sleeping. And he could no longer seem to pray.

He told his therapist, who thought a bit and then said, “Have you considered that God wants to talk to you?”

So when Kelsey woke up at 2:00 that morning, he got up and listened. And so began a daily conversation with God that lasted the rest of his life.

He wrote books about talking with Christ. I learned from him how to how to pray in my imagination, always basing prayers in the Bible.

Methods of Imaging Prayer

I’m doing a video series and a blog series on HOW to do Christian imaging prayer. I’ll workshop two of the main methods:

Image yourself in the gospels. This is always the place to start, because it grounds us in the Bible. In your imagination, you’ll enter a Bible story. You might be Mary or Peter. You might be little Zacchaeus, who nearly fell out of the tree. You might be the woman with a deadly bleed. Or you might be yourself, curious about Jesus and wanting to hear Him. The action starts, guided by the Holy Spirit.

Image yourself at a location. Common imagined locations include beaches, chapels, woods, mountains, deserts, lakes, cabins, rivers –any place where you can imagine yourself being alone and in silence. Then the action starts.

Don’t miss the video or following blog posts on how to do imaging prayer, and the workshop that follows. It may change your life.

Don’t miss any imaging prayer goodness! Please subscribe to my newsletter, and I hope to see you there. Be blessed.