A tip to help you remember prayers and prayer requests

We're weak, forgetful people. (It says so in the Bible, if you can't remember your own experience.) Even if we write down a prayer request, we often forget to check our list. So we need some prayer strategies. Here's one: Build crazy sentences as mnemonics, so you can remember multiple requests easily.

When I was in elementary school we had to remember the order of the biological world – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. My 4th grade teacher taught us “King Phillip, come out for gosh sakes!” as an easy way to remember all seven and keep the order.

So I use the same strategy with prayer requests. The key is to make the sentences or phrases outrageous, so they’re easy to remember. Here are some examples:

“Cover my jammies.” My wife and children’s names start with C, M, and J.

“Let’s take a power walk.” An accountability partner wants me to pray for him about lies, prayer, his time in the Word, temptation while he’s traveling, and his exercise program.

“Keep stomping sludge.” Three of my pastors’ names start with K, S, and S.

Goofy? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. By the way, this strategy is a lot of fun to share with others. Kids of all ages get the idea, and it works.