About Guided Prayer
The Beauty of Guided Prayer Stillness Retreats
Guided prayers—or what we like to call stillness retreats—are resources that we can use in every season of life to reconnect ourselves to that hand-in-hand relationship with the Living God. These tools are specifically designed to focus our hearts and minds on intentional time with our Heavenly Father. As we have studied the spiritual disciplines, Early Church texts, and Christianity’s Jewish roots, we have found that guided prayer was appreciated as a foundational aspect of living an abiding life with God throughout our days. In short, guided prayer has been present throughout the lifespan of the Church and is very much alive in power today.
As followers of Christ, we belong to an ancient tradition, a long priesthood of believers that meditated on God and His Word day and night and responded to it in prayer as they abided in the Way of Jesus. Guided prayers are not scripts to recite each day, but building blocks meant to help you enter into times of worship and rest with the Father—every day of the year. They are a doorway into practicing godly stillness—a way modeled to us by believers of generations past to step into the quiet, soul-healing presence of Jesus.
Our approach to guided prayer, or stillness retreats, incorporates the beauty and depth of expressive arts like music, illustrations, writing, prose, and other unique expressions of the communicable creativity of our Creator. You may sit in a time of Scripture-guided prayer accompanied by an instrumental melody, and then be prompted to respond in listening prayer. You may find yourself in creation, entering into a breathwork practice or cued to make an observance about your surroundings and how you see God moving and working in your midst, helping you to view every minute of your life as a Beth-El moment. Or you may be led to simply sit tranquilly with Jesus—to be still and know that He is I AM—and then carry on from that place of Sabbath-like rest into the remainder of your day.
You don’t have to consider yourself an artist or even creative to find these guided prayers useful; whether you think so or not, one of the amazing ways that God made us in His image was by instilling His own creativity in each of us that surfaces in a myriad of distinctive expressions.
So if you’re looking for a deeper way to connect with the God of our life and long to better recognize His living presence in your walk, then we strongly recommend giving stillness retreats an earnest try.
Intentional practice of stillness retreats and simple guided prayer not only helps us keep our hearts and minds centered on the Father, but it also leads us to surrender more of our days to Him. And as we continue in this way, yielding more and more of our lives to the Holy Spirit to move and work in us as He guides us, hand-in-hand, we will find ourselves naturally living that promised abundant, abiding life with Jesus.