Each month I intend to set prayer habit goals and report on my personal progress and experiences to set an example for readers.
I started this website because I wanted to get better at prayer and help others make time to pray, learn how to pray, and find what to pray. I would also like to share why prayer is so important to our daily lives. Forming prayer habits can be a powerful way to develop a prayer lifestyle.
At the end of February, these are the prayer habits that I can think of:
- At dinner, we pray the Catholic Prayer Before Meals
- Before bedtime, we pray the “Now I lay me down to sleep prayer” with our daughter
- At night before we go to sleep, my wife and I ask for prayers for our needs and the needs of our friends and family
These are all habits. I feel that something is missing if I skip them. I seldom forget to pray at these times and places.
This is only a starting point. I would like to develop prayer habits that create the opportunity for God to work more deeply in my life throughout the day. I will be documenting my experiences here on this website and sharing with you my trials and errors.
As I have already explained, I am not perfect at prayer. The only authority with which I can speak is my own experience and the lessons I have learned from reading Scripture and many books about spirituality.
Prayer Goals for March
You will find that a common theme here at Prayer Habits, is to start small. Habits form over time and we have to build them like a muscle. When you lift weights, you have to start with small before you can lift the heavier weights. When you stop lifting for awhile, you can’t pick up the same weights right away; you have to build up your muscles as you had done before. The same goes with prayer habits. I am in no position to walk with the great mystics and spiritual writers if I can’t even consistently find 5 minutes to pray.
1. Pray Before Blogging
Blogging can be a very narcissistic activity. I write for a number of websites, all of them Catholic, but I realized that I have seldom prayed or offered up the specific activity of content-creation as a gift to God. With so many bloggers out there, I’m very interested if there is a developing spirituality of blogging that is emerging? I will share with you what I can find.
2. Live Out Lenten Commitments
Lent begins on March 9. I haven’t decided what spiritual practices I will be living out yet, but a key goal this month will be to successfully start forming Lenten habits of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. As most of you know, the first few weeks are easy, but its the rest of the 40 days that gets tough.
I will be providing these monthly updates as an example for you to set prayer goals for yourself. What small habit will you try to develop this month? What steps will you take to pave the way for the habit to be formed?
