Quiet time · The war room version

How to make a prayer closet
you'll still use in a month

A prayer closet has two origins, and most people arrive carrying both: Matthew 6:6, and the 2015 film that made the phrase war room ordinary. Both are good reasons to want one. Neither tells you what a closet is actually like to sit in at ten past six in the morning.

I want to be useful rather than inspiring here, so I'll start with the part the guides skip. A closet is small, dark and airless. Those three things are what end the habit — not a lack of discipline, and not the wrong wall colour. They are all solvable. But they have to be solved before you decorate, because once it's decorated you'll blame yourself instead of the room.

The closet isn't the point. The door is.

Choose the closet by its door, not its size

Matthew 6:6 doesn't say find a small room. It says shut thy door. That is the one thing a closet gives you that a chair in a bedroom corner cannot, and it's the only feature worth optimising for. A wide closet with a curtain is worse than a cramped one that latches.

The second test is emptiness. A closet you have to clear out first is a closet you will use twice. Whatever is in there now will come back — coats migrate — and the morning you find it half-full again is the morning the habit quietly ends. Pick the one that is already nearly empty, even if it's the wrong shape.

Some of the links below are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These are the things I actually keep in mine — not a shopping list, and you don't need any of them to start.

Air, before anything else

An enclosed closet with a person in it gets stuffy in about ten minutes. You will not notice this as stuffiness. You will notice it as restlessness at minute twelve, and you will file it under a wandering mind.

So either the door cracks open, or you accept a shorter sitting, or you don't use a closet at all. That last option is a real one and I'd rather say it plainly: a closet with no airflow is worse than a chair by a window. If your only candidate is a sealed box, build a corner instead and don't feel you've compromised.

Light — and why a flame is the wrong answer in here

Almost every prayer-closet photograph you'll find has a lit candle in it. In a closet that advice is not merely aesthetic, it's wrong. A closet is a small enclosed space lined with fabric, usually with clothing still hanging above head height. It is the one room in the house where an open flame at floor level has nothing to recommend it.

There's a second, duller reason: most residential leases and effectively every student residence prohibit open flame outright. If you rent, the decision has already been made for you.

Light without the flame

A pair of 3 × 3 flameless pillars in real wax. The wax matters at close range — moulded plastic reads as plastic from two feet away, and in a closet everything is two feet away. Get the version with a repeating daily timer rather than only a remote, so it sets itself once and then keeps its own appointment. Batteries aren't included.

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Something to sit on, and something over your knees

A closet floor is hard and it is cold, and both of those are clocks counting down. You do not need a prayer bench. You need a cushion you'd sit on anywhere else and something over your legs, because warmth is what lets a person stay still long enough to be still.

Over your knees

A cotton cable-knit throw, around 51 × 67 — large enough to actually cover you, small enough to fold into a closet without becoming a pile. Cotton rather than fleece so it breathes, which matters more in a closed space than an open one. Ours is the cream.

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Where the Bible goes when there's no table

This is the specific problem of a closet and the reason a lot of them fail quietly: there is no surface. A Bible on your lap closes itself, and a Bible on the floor means you're reading bent forward, which you will not do for long.

The surface you don't have

A folding bamboo book stand — the sort meant for cookbooks. It holds a Bible open at a readable angle on the floor or a low shelf, and it folds flat, which is exactly what you want in a space that may have to be a closet again at short notice. Ours is engraved with Psalm 46:5.

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The wall, and an honest warning about it

The index cards taped to the wall are the most recognisable feature of a war room and the first thing to go stale. A wall of thirty requests becomes wallpaper in about a fortnight — you stop reading it, which is the opposite of what it was for.

Write fewer of them than you want to. Put the date on each one. A dated card you can answer later is worth more than twenty undated ones, and the answered ones are the entire reason to keep a wall at all.

Something to write in

The closet's constraint helps here: there's no room for a large journal and nowhere to spread out. Small is correct.

Ours — Saul to Paul

Be Still — a weekly Scripture journal. Fifty-two pages, one a week, built to be small enough that late November doesn't break it. It exists because I kept abandoning the daily ones.

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If the closet doesn't work

For a fair number of people it won't, and that isn't a spiritual failure — it's a ventilation problem, or claustrophobia, or a door that doesn't latch. The room is a tool. If this tool doesn't fit your house, the corner version solves the same problem with different hardware, and nobody is keeping score.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. Matthew 6:6