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One of the ladies in our group asked this question: “Prayer should come from the heart, but when I start, I get lost. What am I supposed to do?”

If prayer feels confusing and you get lost when you try to talk to God, it may not be because you lack faith. It may be because you were never shown how to start the flow of conversation with him.

A simple prayer journaling structure can help you stay connected to God instead of drifting into confusion or analysis.

How I Learned to Have a Conversation With God

When I was a child, someone gave me a brochure that said, “God wants to speak to you. Are you listening?” I followed the instructions. I silenced my thoughts, asked God what he wanted to say, and wrote whatever came to mind.

As I did this routine regularly, I started writing simple thoughts about God loving and guiding me. One day a snarling wolf popped into my head. I asked my spiritual mentor about it, and she helped me learn discernment.

I’ve learned to recognize when the conversation is healthy versus when it’s driven by what I want to hear. There were still times when I didn’t notice the agenda and my own thoughts skewed what I wrote down. But I learned to keep asking for what God was showing me until it became a conversation that made sense.

This really became valuable when I started using this method to talk with God about phrases from the Bible that stood out to me. Often, important insights have come in bits and pieces over time, and sometimes they’ve come together all at once.

Bringing my feelings to God for his love and wisdom is the easy part. Knowing what to do when I don’t feel he’s answering my questions is the hard part. Helping women become confident in their own style of communicating with God is so rewarding.

If you’ve felt confused about how to pray from the heart without getting lost, you’re definitely not alone.

Where Prayer Journaling Tends to Go Wrong

We sit down to pray, hoping to feel God’s love. Why is it so easy to get off track?

Usually it’s one of two things: disengagement or analysis. We might run out of things to pray, and our attention moves to other things. Or we could get distracted studying interesting things in the Bible and start thinking about God instead of interacting with him personally.

When this happens, we often leave our prayer time feeling mentally scattered or emotionally disconnected, and sometimes even spiritually inadequate. This happens even though we genuinely want a relationship with God.

The good news is that a simple prayer journaling routine can help you stay connected with God instead of drifting into confusion or analysis.

Three Ways to Stay in the Conversation

Prayer can be hard to sustain when everything stays inside your head. Your thoughts can start going everywhere unless you have a way to track with the Holy Spirit.

There are three basic ways to do this, and they work together: visualization, the Bible, and journaling.

1. Visualization

What I mean by this isn’t mystical New Age experiences. We’re talking about using our imagination to put ourselves in a biblical scene.

Jesus gave us many pictures to visualize when we pray. Of course, the main one is God as our Father, which we see in the phrase, “Our Father which art in heaven.” Jesus also gave us metaphors for himself: “I am the vine, you are the branches,” “I am the door,” and “the bread of life.” David visualized himself as a sheep when he prayed, “The Lord is my shepherd,” one of the most famous passages in the Bible.

Why are these images so memorable? Visualization keeps our attention on a Person instead of just ideas, and prayer is meant to be relational instead of analytical.

Our goal isn’t to give ourselves messages from God. Our goal in prayer journaling is to give the Holy Spirit a blank slate. We’re simply acting as if God wanted to speak to us and taking the most direct route to get there.

Once the conversation is written down, that’s when we analyze whether it’s biblically sound or not.

2. The Bible

Scripture keeps us on the right track, helps us recognize God’s true character in how we imagine him, and gives direction to the conversation.

Often a passage needs Bible study to understand the message in context. For the pattern I’m about to give you, choose a passage you’ve already studied before.

For me, the most straightforward messages usually come from Paul’s letters, anywhere between Romans and Philemon. That’s what I recommend to others as a place to start. Most committed Christians know a little bit about who Paul was and why he was writing these letters.

3. Journaling

Why do we take the extra time to write our prayers down?

Writing helps vague thoughts become more clear so we can act on what God is showing us. It’s actually important to analyze what’s happening in our relationship with God, just not during the conversation itself.

God gives us simple truths to apply, but it’s easy to forget what he’s doing in our lives as we go throughout the day.

Another way to do this is to speak your prayers out loud, then respond to the insights that come up. You can talk to God as if he’s directly speaking those insights into your mind. You can have a whole conversation this way.

Then afterward, you can write these insights down in your journal. That way it’ll be easier to follow through with implementing them in your daily life.

Three Imbalanced Prayer Approaches

There are three approaches to prayer that can become imbalanced.

The first is the principle-based approach. The most common approach is this: If I apply the right biblical principles, I’ll be following God’s plan for me. Devotional methods like SOAP, which stands for Scripture, observation, application, and prayer, can sometimes stay focused on applying the truth without slowing down long enough for personal encounter.

The second is the impression-based approach. The opposite approach is sensing what we feel God saying. But when we’re not bringing these impressions back to our prayer journal to test them with Scripture, it’s easy to get off track without realizing it.

The third is the discipline-based approach. That’s the approach that says, “If I’m faithful and obedient enough, my intimacy with God will grow.” But over time, this kind of prayer can start to feel more like maintenance than relationship, and we might notice ourselves losing our sense of expectancy and enjoyment.

A truly balanced approach is when we use journaling to apply scriptural principles through a visualized connection with the Father. Over the years of doing this, I’ve found that this is the win-win combination.

The 4-Step Prayer Journaling Shortcut

We call this the shortcut because you’re choosing a Scripture you already understand. You’re not studying it. You’re using it to understand what God thinks about your life.

It’s also a shortcut because this isn’t a decision-making discernment process, so don’t ask God for final guidance here on big things like finances or relationships. Just use this as a way to experience love with God.

Love means enjoyment, and that’s what we were created for.

Step 1: Open Your Bible or Bible App

Choose a familiar passage anywhere between Romans and Philemon, or something else you’ve recently studied. Read until something catches your attention, and copy a few phrases from the Bible onto your paper.

You don’t have to have a journal. Any piece of paper will do fine.

Step 2: Ask God What He Wants You to Know

Write down whatever words or images come into your mind, whether they feel important or not. Don’t try to think of anything in particular. Just let the thoughts come naturally as they usually do.

Step 3: Picture the Father Beside You

Imagine God the Father sitting with you and showing you what this has to do with your life. Often people have thoughts like, “I love you, my child,” and, “I will take care of you. I will never leave you.”

Step 4: Test What You’ve Written

Are there verses in the Bible that say these same ideas? Do an internet search of the Bible if you need to. Based on what you know about God, does it make sense that he’d be showing you this?

Cross out anything that’s not biblical, and keep the rest. This might be God’s message to you.

From Thinking About God to Interacting With Him

By using visualization with journaling and Scripture, we’ve moved from thinking about God to interacting with him.

This keeps us in touch with God’s perspective, so we’re not just applying biblical principles with our own understanding. When we have the confidence that God is actually leading us, we can stand up to the enemy’s doubt and insecurity. Having our relational needs met in Jesus then gives us an overflow of the unconditional love that we need for healthy relationships.

This isn’t a new form of prayer. It’s just a way to draw the Bible into our prayer conversation.

If one of these steps feels forced, just slow down and give it time to go at its own pace. I think you’ll find that it’s so nice to have a reliable pattern that doesn’t force your relationship into a mold. You can literally use this pattern as often as you like, and you won’t run out of ways to connect with God.

You don’t have to get this all down right away. Just start somewhere and see where it leads.

If you’d like me to walk you through this exercise in a video tutorial, go to Sophiculture.com/guide.

The Takeaway

It’s common to get confused in prayer, just like in other relationships like marriage and parenting. Our minds naturally wander and overthink things.

The key is to stay in the process and write down the insights that God gives you. If you don’t have a prayer journaling routine already, you can try this one out. Maybe challenge yourself to step outside the box into a two-way conversation with God.

Our daily bread was never meant to be dry study or analysis. Scripture was always meant to lead us into our relationship with God.

Clarity develops over time, so don’t expect everything to make perfect sense the first time you experiment. As long as you’re looking forward to opening up a fresh page in that prayer journal, that’s what matters.

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Next Steps:

Get our free “Hearing God Starter Kit” and learn the journaling process at:

Sophiculture.com/guide

Get personalized support to build a thriving friendship with Jesus at:

Sophiculture.com/illumination