Dear Friends,
As I mentioned last week, I think September and October are a good time for us to pause and evaluate how we are doing in our following of Jesus. Then, once we have figured out how we are doing, we need to come up with a plan to improve our discipleship and make a commitment to doing better. This week I encourage you to examine your prayer life. How is it going and how could it be better?
Prayer at its most basic level is communication between you and God. What I often hear from people when I ask them directly about their prayer life is that they are in conversation with God all day long. They share with God the events of their day, they turn to God when they are in need, they seek God out for advice, they ask for the Holy Spirit to guide them, and so on. If that is the case – wonderful, but I wonder if perceptions of how often we pray are accurate. In spiritual direction with individuals, I will ask them to take a day or two and truly track their prayer to see if their thoughts about the frequency of their prayer is correct. “Take a note book,” I tell them, “and, once an hour, jot down a few words about the prayer that has happened during that past hour.” For some people their thinking about how often they were praying was accurate, but for most they were praying far less than they thought. I read a study a few years back that looked at how long most Protestant pastors prayed each day. The average was less than ten minutes a day. And these were pastors; the people who are supposed to pray a lot.
Perhaps you do not pray often because your prayer is boring, maybe you have not found a way of praying that fits you, or maybe you are limiting your prayer to what you were taught in grade school. Here is an easy way to learn new ways to pray: just Google “learning new ways to pray” and you fill find some great websites with wonderful ideas about ways that you can pray. There are more than enough ideas on those websites that you could try a new way of praying each week and never run out of ideas.
The important thing is that we pray. In my life, if I do not schedule the prayer, then I will not pray. I will be too busy to pray. I think I have too many important things to get done. Then I think about the Pope. Probably nobody is busier than the Pope, yet he finds time to pray each day. So, if I put the prayer in my calendar then I will pray. If someone asks if I am free during that time, I tell them I have an appointment with my boss. Then I either go to church or to my house or I take a walk or a bike ride or find a quiet corner of the world – so that I can have a conversation with God. The other things will just have to wait.
We should follow the example of Jesus when it comes to the importance of taking time to prayer. Jesus took time away from his preaching and his healing to spend time alone with God. People would always come looking for him and sometimes he had to hide in wilderness places, but he chose to spend time with God over doing the “work” that was at his doorstep. His power came from his prayer. Jesus offers that to us as well. When we pray we are connected to the most powerful thing in the universe. God will give us the strength to manage whatever the world sends our way if we are connected.
Take some time this week to look at the amount of time you pray, how you pray, how much the prayer impacts your life and then make a plan to make your prayer better. At the very minimum, commit to spending a few more minutes each day in prayer. Imagine God holding out his hand and asking you for five – minutes that is. God wants to be with you. Will you be with God?
Peace,
Fr. Damian