Practice?! We're Talking About Practice?

As I was playing guitar one afternoon in preparation for praise team practice, I was struck by how boring practice actually is.  I mean, I've known this for a long time - I played a lot of Little League sports when I was a kid and I HATED practice.  When I began learning how to play guitar (over 20 years ago!), it was different.  I loved it, mainly because typically after a couple of hours, there was noticeable improvement, even though I'll admit that playing chord changes over and over and over again does get a little tiring.  I remember one afternoon sitting in my dorm room trying to figure out The Battle of Evermore by Led Zeppelin, slowly struggling through the chord changes.  After about 10 minutes of me playing disconnected and very rough-sounding approximations of chords, an angry voice from the floor below asked what I was playing. I can't repeat the actual wording of the inquiry.

During the first year of learning to play guitar, it got frustrating simply because there was so much I simply could not do.  After a while, my comfort level grew and I learned that by playing at least 10 minutes every day, those things that once seemed impossible would eventually be in reach. Take barre chords, for example.  These are chords that require you to hold down 5 or 6 strings on the same fret with one finger. Once you get comfortable with barre chords, it opens up a whole range of possibilities for what you can play.  But for a beginner, strengthening your hand enough to make a clean barre chord can be extremely frustrating.  I've known a couple of people who quit progressing (or playing altogether) because they simply couldn't get their barre chords to sound right.  My roommate (and first true guitar instructor) told me when I was struggling with barre chords that one day, it would simply happen.  You'd pick up the guitar thinking you couldn't play barre chords and then - all of a sudden - you were playing them.  This is exactly what happened to me.  One day, after months of working on it, I found that I was playing the chords with relative ease.  What made the difference? 

Practice.

There are good reasons why Christians talk about "spiritual practices" - those things we do to deepen and strengthen our faith:

1. Spiritual practices are not very glamorous nor do they often produce immediate results.  Years ago, I was serving in a church that was trying to start a praise service and I was asked to take the lead in putting the praise team together.  I had scheduled a first practice with several musicians in the church and I anticipated working tediously on 2 or 3 relatively easy songs.  It was going to be a boring hour and a half of chord changes, conversations about counts and tempos and verse-chorus-bridge.  You know, practice.  I found out a few days before that the whole church had been invited to that first practice of the praise team.  Not cool.  I didn't want a bunch of people watching us stumble through those songs - how could I ask these already-hesitant musicians to put themselves through that?  By the same token, we shouldn't invite people to take a front-row seat to watch our spiritual practices.  That's time for us to pray and stumble and try and mumble the same "I'm sorry's" to God.  That's what Jesus is getting at in Matthew 6:1.
2. Spiritual practices are designed to be repetitive actions that form and shape us to 'get in the game'.  Another early song I learned was Gallows Pole (by Led Zeppelin as well).  The chord changes are very fast in that song and by learning those changes, it helped me to learn how to move rapidly when playing.  But it took playing those chords over and over and over again.  If I had only tried to play that song a couple of times and then gave up because I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, my playing of any other songs would have suffered as a consequence.  Taking the time to get those chord changes right in that one song had a huge impact on the rest of my guitar playing.  The same is true of our spiritual practices.  We might find journaling or centering prayer or fasting to be awkward when we first try it, but if we persevere, it can have positive impact on the rest of our life. 
3. Practice reminds us that doing something well requires work and commitment.  I don't know how many times I've had people say to me: "I wish I could play guitar. I've always wanted to learn."  I'm always polite in my responses.  I fully understand the time and commitment it takes to learn an instrument.  But, I'm tempted to say in response: "You might have wanted to play guitar.  You didn't want to learn to play guitar."  If you want to learn to play guitar (or do pretty much anything, for that matter), it can be done.  You've got to work for it.  The same is true of discipleship.  So many of us want a better prayer life, to know the Bible better, to have greater discipline or patience or humility, etc.  What we want so often is the end result, but we resist the work it takes to get there.  Why?  Because it's slow and unglamorous and it takes time and commitment. 

So, today, find a quiet place to be for a few minutes, put down the phone, step away from the screen and practice…