While I have yet to make it past Chapter four in Praying with Paul (grace and peace, right?), I was challenged even before I finished the preface of the book. According to D. A. Carson, one of the major problems within the Western Church is prayerlessness. Ok, great. I pray daily. Clearly this doesn’t apply to me. The two pitfalls within the Western Christian church are too much activity that doesn’t include prayer and praying without a basis in the scriptures. OK, maybe I do pray daily, but are my prayers as well thought out as they should be? Are they too simplistic? Do I focus too much on my own wants and needs? They aren’t always based in scriptures. I rarely sit down with the Bible and pray a passage…clearly, I have a lot to learn.
The first action I took to try to improve my prayer life was beginning to create space. (I write the word beginning, because truthfully, I still have a long ways to go.) Now…I’m a home schooling mother of three. I’m almost to the third trimester in my pregnancy. My husband has been working 60-75 hours a week. I get excited when he is home by 6 pm (he leaves in the morning before 7 am!). We are in the process of building a new home and preparing our current one to sell. We are locked down for a pandemic and neither my cleaning lady nor baby sitter are able to come. I don’t have the ability to create an actual set apart quiet time. My two year old is currently yelling that his cup is shaped like a cat (Spoiler alert…it’s an owl! For the sake of silence though, his older siblings have now concluded that it is indeed a cat.) I cannot create true silence. I can however create stillness in my mind. For me, this means trying to remember to put my phone down (working on it), turning off the TV (I’m OK with this one), and just quieting my mind. It means spending time praying while folding the laundry before turning on TV or music. It means choosing to sing worship songs that address the words I want to pray while rocking my two year old to sleep.
My next action actually involved my time with my children (which is the majority of the day for sure!). This one will be a life long work of progress. In the evenings before my children go to bed I pray out loud over them. I don’t always manage to do this nightly, but I do every time I can for each child. Up until this point, the majority of my prayers over them have been my wishes for them. Their prayers are essentially a nightly blessing over them. My two oldest were naturally fearful babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, and I always found that this seemed to provide them comfort as well as a nightly reminder that when I walked out of the room, God continued to stay there with them. We always pray together to thank God for our food. On occasion, when scary things have happened, we have prayed together for a family member’s health, comfort for others in times of loss, or just that the coronavirus would flat out go away. However, we do not make a regular habit of praying for others as a family. So, I sat down with my children and we created a prayer basket. It’s a basket to write others who we should be remembering to pray for in and then we pray for them. I hope to begin to incorporate this regularly. Carrying it out is going to take some discipline on my behalf.
Above all else though, I have never been so aware of the fact that I can’t do everything I feel I should be doing daily on my own. Thankfully, Paul feels the same way and interlaces this throughout the majority of his prayers within scripture. So often I find that I fall short of the standards I hold myself to in all areas of life: prayer, bible reading, parenting, marriage, keeping my house clean, exercising, meal planning, and making sure my two year old does not run outside and immediately make a mud puddle. There is so much craziness around me all the time, and as I near the third trimester of my pregnancy my energy is waning. Thankfully, Paul ALWAYS recognizes that the reason we CAN and WILL try harder is because of the Grace and Strength that comes from Christ to us. We ARE NOT doing this on our own. We do not depend on our own strength and grace. All of our good works for God are through the strength we obtain from Christ.
The first action I took to try to improve my prayer life was beginning to create space. (I write the word beginning, because truthfully, I still have a long ways to go.) Now…I’m a home schooling mother of three. I’m almost to the third trimester in my pregnancy. My husband has been working 60-75 hours a week. I get excited when he is home by 6 pm (he leaves in the morning before 7 am!). We are in the process of building a new home and preparing our current one to sell. We are locked down for a pandemic and neither my cleaning lady nor baby sitter are able to come. I don’t have the ability to create an actual set apart quiet time. My two year old is currently yelling that his cup is shaped like a cat (Spoiler alert…it’s an owl! For the sake of silence though, his older siblings have now concluded that it is indeed a cat.) I cannot create true silence. I can however create stillness in my mind. For me, this means trying to remember to put my phone down (working on it), turning off the TV (I’m OK with this one), and just quieting my mind. It means spending time praying while folding the laundry before turning on TV or music. It means choosing to sing worship songs that address the words I want to pray while rocking my two year old to sleep.
My next action actually involved my time with my children (which is the majority of the day for sure!). This one will be a life long work of progress. In the evenings before my children go to bed I pray out loud over them. I don’t always manage to do this nightly, but I do every time I can for each child. Up until this point, the majority of my prayers over them have been my wishes for them. Their prayers are essentially a nightly blessing over them. My two oldest were naturally fearful babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, and I always found that this seemed to provide them comfort as well as a nightly reminder that when I walked out of the room, God continued to stay there with them. We always pray together to thank God for our food. On occasion, when scary things have happened, we have prayed together for a family member’s health, comfort for others in times of loss, or just that the coronavirus would flat out go away. However, we do not make a regular habit of praying for others as a family. So, I sat down with my children and we created a prayer basket. It’s a basket to write others who we should be remembering to pray for in and then we pray for them. I hope to begin to incorporate this regularly. Carrying it out is going to take some discipline on my behalf.
Above all else though, I have never been so aware of the fact that I can’t do everything I feel I should be doing daily on my own. Thankfully, Paul feels the same way and interlaces this throughout the majority of his prayers within scripture. So often I find that I fall short of the standards I hold myself to in all areas of life: prayer, bible reading, parenting, marriage, keeping my house clean, exercising, meal planning, and making sure my two year old does not run outside and immediately make a mud puddle. There is so much craziness around me all the time, and as I near the third trimester of my pregnancy my energy is waning. Thankfully, Paul ALWAYS recognizes that the reason we CAN and WILL try harder is because of the Grace and Strength that comes from Christ to us. We ARE NOT doing this on our own. We do not depend on our own strength and grace. All of our good works for God are through the strength we obtain from Christ.
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