Too many prayer requests?

I'm wrestling with an idea right now.  I wanted to wait to post till I had "figured it out" but maybe I never will.

I love spending time with girls.  Whether it's casual and we're watching TV together, or it's deep and we're crying together - I always come away refreshed when I meet with a girl friend.  There's one problem:  Lately I have too many friends I want to spend time with!  The last two weeks I started limiting myself by visiting with only one friend a day.  Even with that boundary, I started to need a day to myself!  And even with two weeks of careful visiting, I am looking at my "list of people I want to hang out with" and the tally is at 8.

I look at that number and I know I'm not going to be able to satisfy my desire to see all of them, since I know that when I get really tired of being social, I tend to neglect my homemaking and my meal planning and other projects that require energy.  So even though it is a good thing to spend time with all of my friends, it is a better thing to prioritize and plan special time for them when I'm not overwhelmed.

Not only is this healthy for me, but it honors my friends, too.  I am choosing not to visit with them until I can give them my full time and attention.  Otherwise I am in danger of being unloving - rushing them through their visit, being impatient, becoming resentful.

That was a metaphor for what I'm going to talk about next.

I listened to the first half of Charles Spurgeon's sermon, "True Prayer - True Power" yesterday.  When he said that "earnest desire" is an essential qualification of prayer, I knew it.  I mean, my prayer life has improved so much in the last few months.  I certainly know the difference between the dispassionate prayers I used to pray and the desire I have now.

This must be why I feel so guilty when someone adds to my prayer list and I don't have room for it.  Not because I can't pray or don't want to.  It's this:  I have the things I am passionately praying for.  I know they are Holy Spirit led.  Sometimes they are for specific people, sometimes for world things.  Really most of my prayer time is spent reconciling me with God, because how can I mediate for other people when I'm distant from God myself?

I feel like I'm letting down a friend when they share a prayer request and I don't pray for it.  I try not to agree unless I really plan to; or I pray right then just to get it out of the way.

But I feel kind of the same way as visiting with friends.  I have a certain amount of time and energy to spend in prayer.  Yes, "ideally" I would be on my knees all day, just like "ideally" I would have the time and energy to visit with any friend any time I want to or she wants to.  And it would require being on my knees all day to truly pray for everything I want to pray for, plus everything everyone else wants me to pray for.  Because it's not prayer if I don't desire it.  And if I don't desire it, then it's just words I am speaking out of duty to a friend.

And it's not ideal to spend all my time on my knees or all my time with my friends.  God's given me work to do.   Can you imagine me telling Joe, "I didn't make you dinner because I was talking to God and he's more important than you."

I won't commit to visiting with a friend unless I can give her my full attention.  Likewise, from this moment on, I won't commit to praying for a friend unless I can give her prayer my full attention.

For this reason, I encourage you to share your heartfelt prayer requests with me.  Because chances are if we are friends and you have something close to your heart, it will be close to my heart too.

I also want to caution you: if you search your life for prayer requests and share things like "my mom's coworker's cousin has cancer," I might not pray for that person specifically.  I don't know this person.  My friend doesn't even know this person.  I can't feel emotion about this person, especially if my friend doesn't even feel emotion about him or her.  I can feel emotion about a person that I know who has cancer, so I will spend my limited time and energy praying for my friend instead.

Does this seem heartless?  But if I prayed for every request I came across, not only would I never have time for God's work (as mentioned before) but my prayers would be void of desire.  They would become stale and duty-filled while I tried to work through a list.  And that is dishonoring to God.

So I am not going to commit to a prayer request unless I can bring it to God with my whole heart.  I won't dishonor him with half-hearted prayers, and I won't dishonor you by agreeing to pray for something and not really caring.

This is how I have thought through this issue, but I have no biblical references except that the Bible says to "pray without ceasing."  I have two kinds of prayer I do:  One, I sit with my notebook and my Bible and I spend time just praying and thinking and listening and writing.  Two, I think of things as I go through the day and send up quick prayers in the moment.  In the second sense I "pray without ceasing."  But I can't spend all day in my room with the door closed.

Is my thinking flawed?  I want to stop feeling guilty for what I don't pray for.