The Right to Pray

A couple of thoughts have been mulling in my head for a while and were awakened by my recent journeys through the airport system. I was reminded of some Muslims that were arrested because of their "suspicious" actions, which included prayer. I am not going to get into whether or not the TSA acted appropriately or not. Instead I want to use that as a starting place to talk about prayer. I vaguely recall, though not with much context or details, a conversation I had with someone expressing their frustation over the respect given by companies to Muslims for their prayer time. I think it was based on mostly on why they got to do it and Christians did not.
This conversation fascinates me because part of what is getting laminated I think by this other person is the fact that Christians do not make a huge deal about prayer. While Muslisms are required to prayer 5 times a day, Christians as a whole probably average at best once. Public prayer is also something that is uncomfortable for many and seen as exceptional rather than commonplace.
All of this highlights a need for Christians to reclaim their part in prayer. I do not want to occur at the expense of others, such as mandating prayer in schools. But I would like to see prayer done in a more open and direct way. I wonder, but do not know, if the same people who call for prayer in school pray regularly at work with their fellow Christian coworkers. I think it would be great if prayer became somehting that needed no mandate to occur, no religious dictation but was an activity that was simply fostered out of the our love of God and our belief in the power of prayer. I think it is beholden of every Christian to make prayer much more common place, the norm for a Christian, rather than the exception.