The world lost an absolute icon yesterday. Dolly Parton has certainly been a constant presence throughout my life, from growing up and watching her perform fairly regularly on the tv show Hee Haw, to seeing her portray the beauty shop owner Truvy in the movie Steel Magnolias, to receiving the monthly books from her Imagination Library when the boys were young, to taking them to Dollywood many times when we lived in Knoxville. Dolly was a genuinely and generously good person, and the whole world will miss the light and the love that she shared with so many people from all walks of life.

This month we have been exploring the topic of prayer both in our worship series on the Lord’s Prayer and in these midweek messages. This coming weekend, we are all invited to lift up the neighborhoods where we live and our community as a whole in prayer, and this Sunday we will have some more yard signs that you can take and post in your yard to let your neighbors know we are praying for them. I was curious to see if Dolly Parton had anything in particular to say about prayer. Turns out, she did!

In a clip posted on YouTube, Dolly shares this: “There’s a scripture in the Bible that says, ‘Pray without ceasing,’ and I used to think that was the silliest thing I ever heard. Well, I thought, ‘How do you pray without ceasing?’ But that just means to keep that in your mind, to where it’s just planted there. And then you can kind of always draw from that all through the day.” She went on to say she tries to apply that approach to prayer to everything she does. “And so, I think it’s very important to keep that first and foremost, and that keeps you strong, and that keeps you grounded.”

I like how Dolly understood that prayer seems to be less about saying certain words or thinking certain thoughts and more about simply being in an abiding attitude and atmosphere of prayerfulness.

I wonder how Dolly’s approach to prayer might inform—and transform—your own practice of prayer, and mine, too!