Many of us may ask this question: I do care about prayer, and I just want to pray the five daily prayers on time, but I have trouble doing them on time and regularly. How can I get into it?
The fact that you even care about your prayers is an incredible sign of God’s love for you and His desire to keep you close to Him! How many Muslims do you know personally who have not prayed in years and who have no desire to do so? God has honored you by placing in your heart the desire to fulfill this part of your relationship with Him. The question is: will you accept being chosen and show Him that you really care?
Praying the five daily prayers on time everyday is a good habit that just needs to be built. You’ve been building habits since you were a child and this is just another habit you need to develop and strengthen.
How do I know you’ve been habit building? Without knowing you, I’m going to give you a simple example.
Consider the call of hunger. When you were an infant and you were hungry, you’d likely call out for someone to quell the pain of your hunger. Someone in your life most likely came to help you take care of this need; they fed and nourished you, and your body, in turn, responded and began to grow.
As you developed and learned how to eat for yourself, you most likely recognized the call to hunger and developed a habitual response (i.e. eating). The type and proportions of food you ate began to impact your body; the healthy foods for your body helped nourish you and strengthened your physical and mental development.
The overindulgence of food or consistent consumption of unhealthy and junky foods likely began to deteriorate your body. Eventually, your time will pass and your soul will depart. Your body will no longer feel the need for, nor be able to respond to, the call of hunger.
The habit of eating when feeling hungry is one you developed; even if it was time consuming, you realized it was something you had to do to survive.
Let’s now consider salah (prayer). Every day, five times a day, your body, your heart and your soul, are begging you to respond to the call to prayer. For those who choose to respond to the call to prayer, you satiate your body, heart, and soul. However, just as with food, this satiation comes in different ways. Those who come to prayer with presence of heart and mind, with focus and desire to nourish and cleanse themselves spiritually, often begin to see the positive impact of their prayers on the rest of their lives.
Some others may answer the call to prayer more neglectfully, perhaps offering them on time or late, all of them or just some of them, but rushing through them mindlessly or negligently. These individuals are still nobly choosing to answer the call, yet like the junk food that can cause a body to be sick and stunt its healthy development and maintenance, this type of prayer could stunt a person’s spiritual growth, perhaps making them weak against succumbing to desires or fighting diseases of the heart and soul.
Finally, just as a dead body does not experience hunger, a spiritually dead person does not feel the need or have interest in responding to the call of prayer. The difference, however, is that while the dead body no longer has a chance to experience revitalization through food, the spiritually dead heart can be revived through prayer.
Prayer alone is not the key to a completely sound spiritual state or understanding, just as food alone is not the only component to maintain a healthy body. However, through developing a focused, centered, and meaningful habit of maintaining the five daily prayers, a person will, God willing, experience incredible benefits in this life and undoubtedly the next.
So, once we’ve recognized that salah is a healthy survival habit which one has the capability to work on maintaining throughout one’s life, the question then becomes: How?
Here are a few suggestions to perhaps get you started. Two are geared to convince and encourage your mind and heart to pray while three are specific tasks to help you begin and maintain the action of prayer.
Recognize the benefits.
Simply consider the following as a start: ”The five obligatory daily prayers, the Friday prayer followed by another Friday prayer, Ramadan followed by another Ramadan, expiate sins committed in between them as long as major sins are avoided”. (Muslim)
”The first thing the people will be accountable for on the Day of Judgment is prayer. Allah will say to His angels (even though He already knows): “Look at my servant’s prayers. Were they complete or not?” If they were complete, it will be written as complete. If they were not fully complete Allah will say: “See if my servant has voluntary prayers”. If he has them, Allah will say: “Complete his obligatory prayers shortage with his voluntary prayers.” Then the rest of his deeds will be dealt with in the same manner.” (Ahmad)
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Every day, five times a day, your body, your heart and your soul, are begging you to respond to the call to prayer.
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