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BY ROD MILLER

The Adventure Gbwc_superusere, a daily devotional book published by the Baltimore-Washington Conference to help its members navigate life with meaning, inspiration and purpose, has gone into its second printing.

Throughout the conference people are beginning to experience the power of joining with more than 12,000 others in a daily discipline of reading and pondering the Scripture and then turning to God in prayer. Lives are being transformed.

I think that the concept of 'discipline' is one many of our churches and members are ready to explore more deeply.

In my early twenties, it was a huge turn in my thinking when I realized the truth that we are most free when we choose to be bound. Scripture says it is not whether or not you are a slave - it is who or what we choose to be enslaved to. Freedom doesn?t consist in being able to do whatever we want whenever we want. That dream is false. It comes from being committed and dedicated to something greater than ourselves and choosing to live our lives in line with it.

Real freedom is not the absence of limitations on our actions but the joyous acceptance of limitations inherent in the new loyalty.

This sense of discipline calls to mind those religious orders who 'pray the divine hours,' a practice developed by St. Benedict in the sixth century as an expression of disciplined daily prayer.

Underlying this form of prayer is the understanding that prayer is the work of the church. It is the responsibility that the church bears before God. The prayer of the church is the outlet of heaven.

A powerful Chinese Christian from the last century wrote that 'God has many things stacked up in heaven. He cannot accomplish them unless there is an outlet for him on earth. The highest and greatest work of the church is to be the outlet of God?s will through prayer.' It was St. Benedict who said, 'To pray is to work and to work is to pray.' It is he who gave us the understanding of 'divine work.'

For Benedict, fixed hour prayer was and will always be the divine work. As for the hours on whose striking the prayers are done, those belong to God and are as a result 'divine.'

Fixed hour prayer is, with Holy Communion, the oldest surviving form of Christian spirituality.

The Psalms refer to this: 'Seven times a day do I praise you' (Psalm 119:164). The first healing by the disciples in the Book of Acts takes place where and when it did because they were on their way to ninth-hour (3 p.m.) prayers.

The idea of 'Divine Hours' also has some basis in the Roman culture, where the forum bells were rung in order to give order to the day. In the cities of the empire, the forum bell was rung at the beginning of the day, at 6 a.m., noted the day?s progress by ringing again at 9 a.m., sounded the lunch break at 12:00, called citizens back to work by striking the 3 p.m. bell, and closed the day?s markets by ringing at 6 o?clock in the afternoon. Every part of Roman life came to be ordered by the ringing of the bells, including Jewish and later Christian prayer, as well.

Most of us don?t have bells to punctuate our days. But our lives are given order by our set of usual activities, which provide a set of boundaries for our lives that may be pretty rigid. We often feel like our lives are programmed to such an extent that there is no time - no possibility - of making any changes or adjustments.

So when we even consider a discipline like fixed hour praying, it sounds like one more thing to add to our Palm Pilots, one more thing to do when I am already too busy.

But there are important spiritual reasons for this type of praying. For one, it keeps us from letting the day slip away and never getting to prayer. Secondly, it is one of the practices of Jesus, the disciples, the early church and of the church throughout history. Thirdly, when you pray at a fixed hour, you can be filled with a conscious awareness that you are praying with other Christians at the same time that they are praying, and when you finish, like the relay runners who hand the torch to the next runner, you pass the prayer to the next pray-ers thereby becoming a part of a continuous cascade of prayer before the throne of God.

But if praying the hours is too much for everyday, we could all take five minutes in the morning to dedicate our lives to God.

In the Iona Community in Scotland they have a practice called 'The Plotted Day.' In this practice, you start each day by going deliberately through the day in advance, asking God?s presence in each foreseeable circumstance.

You won?t be able to predict everything that may take place, but the main responsibilities and relationships will be there for you. This practice may help events sort themselves out in ways you didn?t expect. The big things become big and the small things small. Priorities may also change.

But in the course of your plotted day, The Adventure Gbwc_superusere can provide sparks of scriptural wisdom and pondering to gbwc_superusere you. It?s time we each intentionally answered the invitation: 'Let us pray,' hour by hour, day by day.

The Rev. Rod Miller is director of connectional ministries for the Baltimore-Washington Conference.