Craig T. Owens

Be honest: have you ever crammed for an exam? You’re up late into the night “cramming” info into your brain, then chugging Coke or Mt. Dew or coffee the next morning to try to wake up.

You get to class and fly through your test, trying to get all of the information out of your brain before it evaporates. Perhaps you do well on the test, but if someone were to quiz you on the same material a week later, you’d probably recall very little of what you studied. If the teacher asks you the next school year what you remember from that exam, your mind might be blank.

Years later you might be flipping through the radio dial, and a song comes on that you haven’t heard for years. You turn up the volume, and start singing along to the song, recalling that this was the very song you were listening to the night you were cramming for that exam.

Why is it that can you recall everything about this song, and very little about what you studied? The answer is that music engages the whole brain. Both the left hemisphere of your brain (which remembers facts) and the right hemisphere (which remembers music) work together as a powerful memory tool.

Did you know this can be just as powerful in your prayers?

There is a  Hebrew word (tephillah) for prayer which means a prayer set to music; a poetic prayer; a sacred song. This is the word used heavily in the first 72 psalms.

In other words, the psalmists linked words and melodies—left and right brain hemispheres—together to help our songful prayers get locked into our memory banks. The more we remember what God has done for us in answering our prayers, the more likely we are to keep on praying and keep on trusting Him in the future. 

Many times when I am reading Scripture, a song or hymn will come to my mind, and I pause to hum that melody. Maybe God will give you a new song to sing, or perhaps you will write your own personal melody as you pray. There’s no wrong way to sing your prayers.

However you do it, it’s a powerful memory tool when we sing our prayers to our Heavenly Father.