Midday · 4 min read
Why stop at noon? A short history of praying at midday
Praying in the middle of the day is one of the oldest habits in Scripture, and it takes about a minute to begin.
Most people who pray do it at the edges of the day, on waking or before sleep. The middle is harder. By noon you are deep in work, errands or children, and the morning’s good intentions are a long way behind you. That is a large part of why believers have stopped to pray at midday for a very long time.
Noon in the Psalms and in Daniel
The habit is older than the church. In Psalm 55, David is in real trouble, betrayed by a close friend, and he describes how often he turns to God.
Evening, morning, and at noon, I will cry out in distress. He will hear my voice.
Psalm 55:17 (WEB)
Three times are named, and noon is one of them. The book of Daniel shows the same rhythm kept at great cost. Daniel was a senior official in a foreign court, far from Jerusalem. When a law was signed forbidding prayer to anyone but the king, he went home and did what he had always done.
When Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house (now his windows were open in his room toward Jerusalem) and he kneeled on his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did before.
Daniel 6:10 (WEB)
The last words carry the weight: as he did before. Daniel was keeping a habit he already had, and it held when it was tested.
The first Christians kept the hours
The first followers of Jesus were Jews who already prayed at set times, and the book of Acts shows them continuing. In Acts 3, Peter and John go up to the temple at the hour of prayer in the afternoon. In Acts 10, the vision that sends Peter to the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, comes during a midday prayer.
Now on the next day as they were on their journey and got close to the city, Peter went up on the housetop to pray at about noon.
Acts 10:9 (WEB)
An early Christian handbook called the Didache tells believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. In the centuries that followed, monastic communities arranged their whole day around fixed hours of prayer. The Rule of Benedict, written in the sixth century, includes a short service at the sixth hour, which is to say around noon. Several church traditions still have a brief midday office in their prayer books. Some early Christian writers also linked the hour with the crucifixion, because the Gospels record darkness falling at the sixth hour.
Why the middle of the day
Morning prayer sets a direction, and evening prayer looks back. Midday prayer does something different: it interrupts. By noon the day has usually taken on a momentum of its own. A short stop lets you notice what has been driving you since breakfast, and hand the afternoon to God before it is spent.
It also keeps prayer from becoming something that only happens in quiet rooms. Peter was on a roof, hungry, waiting for a meal. Daniel had a kingdom to help govern. Prayer at noon happens with the phone buzzing and the task half done, and that is part of its value.
A one-minute midday prayer you can start today
You do not need a prayer book or a chapel. One minute is enough to begin, and a minute is easy to protect.
- Set a quiet alarm for noon, or tie the pause to something fixed, such as sitting down to eat.
- Stop what you are doing. Put the phone face down and take your hands off the keyboard.
- Take three slow breaths and say, “Lord, I am here.”
- Read or recite one short line of Scripture. A single verse from the Psalms works well.
- Tell God in one sentence how the day is going, and ask for what the afternoon needs.
- Close with the Lord’s Prayer or a simple “Amen,” and go back to work.
If you miss noon, pray when you remember. One o’clock is fine. If you are with other people, you can do all of this silently, at your desk or in a parked car, and no one needs to know.
Keep it short on purpose
The temptation with any new practice is to make it bigger. Resist that for the first month. A pause you can finish is one you will repeat tomorrow, and repetition is what turns a good idea into a habit. If you want to add anything, add a second line of the same psalm, or the name of one person who needs help this afternoon.
Over time the minute may grow, or it may stay a minute. Either way you will be doing what David, Daniel and Peter did before you. They stopped in the middle of things, with the day unfinished, and turned toward God.