NOTES for Col 4:2
Paul singles out one very important aspect of spiritual life: constancy. And, judging from the apostle's words, this should be constant thanksgiving. To people without faith, such a call sounds somewhat artificial: the demand to thank God for everything, even for what cannot in any way be called good for a person, seems unnatural to them, and often hypocritical.
Still, one has to admit that even a believer, if he remains within traditional religious boundaries, usually gives thanks for problems, hardships, and misfortunes, if he does so at all, with some strain and more out of religious duty. That is understandable: God does not want evil for a person and does not create it at all; any evil is the work of the hands and wills of those who either directly oppose God or ignore Him. Evil does not come from God, although at times He permits it to exist, and then the Bible speaks of such evil as "evil from God."
But even permission turns out not to be God's desire to do evil in order, for example, to punish someone, as religious consciousness sees the situation, but a consequence of the abuse of the freedom that God gives every being He has created who possesses self-awareness and therefore the ability to build a conscious relationship with Him. What, then, can a person thank God for when, as it appears, nothing good is happening in his life?
The answer may be Paul's mention of prayer, the very constancy in which he urges. Of course, if we treat prayer only as a religious duty, as words we are required to say to God some number of times a day, it can hardly help us, especially in a difficult situation. With that kind of prayer, what usually happens is what believers who find themselves in such a situation often complain about: there are already plenty of problems, there is no strength and no time, and now one still has to find time to pray...
But the apostle is plainly not speaking about that kind of prayer. He speaks of real prayer, the kind that involves the meeting of two wills, God's and human, in that inner space of a person where his spiritual life is born. This is something entirely different: such prayer opens another reality to a person, the reality of God's world, the reality of the Kingdom. And here there is always something for which to thank God. Here is the fullness of life, which is always with the one who prays and which no one will take away from him. A fullness for which thanksgiving is entirely natural, just as the apostle says.