My SPARK benefits have been:

• More time in prayer. I spend anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour or more in my prayer closet every day.
• Deepening quality of prayer.  I listen more and a intercede more for others.
• Growing desire to pray.  Pray isn’t an obligation I need to squeeze in.  I want to pray more.  I loving my prayer time.
• Living out the Word more fully.  Each week a verse of the week and action focus guide my daily living.  These guides have prompted me to actively set goals for living faithfully to God’s Word and I am doing it!  Yay!
• Intimacy with God. I am so much more alive to what God is doing. My SPARK is burning brighter everyday.  It’s like I am headed toward a bonfire of faith rather than struggling to keep a flickering flame  alive.
• Life Lessons/Wisdom. God has granted me insights for living and growing.  Through studying proverbs I am beginning to understand what is important and what is not important for me to invest my time in daily.
• Strength for the journey.  Life is demanding right now. Yet every day in my prayer closet God grants me the strength, words, wisdom, or whatever else I need to make it through the day with out being overwhelmed.  God is good!

 
Most of these benefits have come from Study, Prayer and Action via my prayer closet discipline. My attention to Rest has been great up until the last week or so, when I got a bit sloppy in guarding my sleep pattern.  My prayer closet time in general has been one big piece of Kindling that is perpetually feeding my faith fire.  Nevertheless, I have started to feel God tugging me to expose myself to knew things that can enhance my faith.
 

My verse for the week is…

“Do you see a man skillful in his work?  He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.”  Proverbs   22:28-29

When I read these verses this morning, I wrote in the margin of my bible, “work on your craft.” Part of being wise is becoming excellent in the vocation God has given you. Great disciples honor God in their work. God has given us His absolute best in his son, Jesus Christ.  Our thankful response should always be to give God our very best.  That said, I realized today that if you want to to give God your best then you should always strive to improve the skills of your work.
 
So, on the way to work I stopped at a bookstore and bought three things:  this  month’s copy of Bible Study Magazine and Success Magazine, and the book The Daily Writer.  Each of them will feed, inspire and educate me.  Consider them professional kindling for my God-given craft.  Bible Study Magazine will kindle my ability to read the Bible.  I am hoping to glean from it fresh perspectives, discipling tips and study tools. The Daily Writer, subtitled, “366 meditations to cultivate a productive and meaningful writing life”, will help me grow in the skill of writing.  So much of my work is writing:  newsletter articles, Sunday school lessons, sermons, blog posts, letters, etc.  Lastly, I always find Success Magazine inspiring and informative.
 

Consider these question to help you give God your very best.

• What could you do to offer God your very best as a parent, busyness owner, student, or employee?
• What could you learn today that would help you perfect your skills in one of those areas?
• What new knowledge would make you better?
• What practice would help you perfect the work God has called you to do?
• What would the ideal skillful worker look like in your field?
• How can you take a concrete action step (no matter how small) to move toward being that ideal?

Blessings in your quest to give God your best,
 
 

John Arnold,

ThePracticalDisciple
 
 
p.s. Pictured below is my desktop for the week. Right click here to download a full size version.

• It could humble us.
• Remind us that we are dependent upon God and can’t do things on our own.
• Help us focus and prioritize what we do. Help us discover what is most important.
• Help us purge things that have just become habit and may be aren’t as important as they used to be.
• Force us us to adjust and get our of our ruts. Make some changes.
• Teach us to save and be better stewards of the resources we do have.
• Cause us to be hands-on in ministry that we might have simply written checks to before.
• Bring us together and build a tighter family/community.
• Push us to evaluate.
• Allow us and opportunity to see God’s work.

As I consider the blessings that God might have in store for us, one of my favorite verses from Philippians keeps flooding my mind,

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Phil. 4:6)

 
I have adopted that as my VOW (Verse Of the Week) My related focus for the week is “Thankful Request.”
 
I will be very intentional about the requests that I make to God this week, both in terms of content and the quality of those requests.
 
What keeps coming to mind as I ponder this verse is that God truly wants and expects us to call out to Him. Like a loving parent, God wants to hear the concerns and desires of your heart.
 
That said, my focus will be on being very specific in the requests that I put before God and making sure that all that I ask is done so from a place of great appreciation.
 
The graphic above is a mini-version of a desktop I created for myself as a constant reminder of my VOW and focus for the week. Feel free to download it by right clicking here: Free Desktop for Week 4.
 Blessings.
   

Laurence Freeman, OSB - Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation

Today’s post is a treat. Kathleen Weller, director of Peace River Spirituality Center in Naples, Florida is a godly woman with a true heart for prayer and simply being still before God. With her permission I have been allowed to repost this recent post from her blog, The Celtic Monk. I found it a much needed reminder that the path through crisis in her words is ” through the very heart of God–seeking, abiding, cleaving there.” Enjoy the post.

Have you ever met one of your heroes? I’m not talking about someone who saved your life, or won the game, but someone who you’ve admired from afar. Maybe it’s an author or a public figure who you’ve grown to respect more than simply admire. Who are these people who loom large in your life?
 
Laurence Freeman (above) has been a hero of mine for some time. Over the past three years, I’ve read everythng he’s written on Christian meditation and have listened to CD’s of talks he’s given around the world. He was chosen as the spiritual guide for WCCM, after the death of its founder,Fr.John Main. While in Cork at the pre- conference retreat of WCCM, I had the opportunity to listen to six presentations by Laurence and the photo above was taken by a Canadian participant as I was talking to him following one of the sessions.
 

Freeman’s topic was living in times of crisis. Looking around the world, he named the crises in their many forms: economic, social, personal, spiritual. Crises affect individual lives, families, communities [including the Church] and nations. While his hope was that Christians would be doing more than cursing the darkness along with everyone else. But Freeman voiced his fear that along with people of no faith, believers too have lost their way. Too many have naively believed that like for other dilemmas we’ve acted as though we can just Google an answer and it will come… or we can read the latest book by a guru, or just keep our heads down until the crisis passes. It’s unfortunate that we’re only slowly coming to realize that our past coping skills are useless in a worldwide crisis that even experts are loathe to predeict how long, how much worse or how to get out. The best thoughts, plans, experiences, have not helped us to crawl from the havoc. And they never will.
 

In times of trouble, in times of uncertainty, in times of small personal crisis as well as worldwide crises the scope of which has beset us over the last few years, our hope is found in the same place, in the same person, in the same way. Hope, like peace is God’s gift and the way to the other side of trial is through the very heart of God–seeking, abiding, cleaving there.
 

Most of us have found ways to adjust to the fragility of the economy, our smaller portion of all we’d become accustomed to and the lowering what we see on the horizon for our future. But coping is no way to live the abundant life. Coping is not the same as living in hope, peace or joy. Do you know how to access the place where these treasures reside in the heart of God? Is it your practice to spend time there? Are these golden lights part of your daily expereince?
 

While the lectures, writings and insights of Freeman have been important to me… they’ve never been an end in themselves. Freeman’s work relentlessly points beyond himself to the One Who is, Who was, and is to come. He writes and speaks to help others (now around the world) learn how to find the One who holds eternal treasures.
 

Crises come to all of us and our loving God desires to help us meet even the ones we’re likely to think we can handle on our own. May you find your way to the heart of God this week. I’ll see you there. BLESSINGS AND JOY, Kathleen Bronagh Weller, THE CELTIC MONK

Yesterday’s post seems to have really struck a chord. Given yesterday’s surge in readers, it appears that many of us struggle with remembering. Among comments I received was another great tip from PD reader, Beth Kaiser. Beth wrote,

“Today’s message reminded me of a friend who, when there was a particularly pressing prayer need, such as someone having surgery, special test, job interview, etc,. he would wear his watch on the opposite wrist. Then every time he would look for his watch and find a bare wrist he would whisper a prayer for that need.”

The nice thing about this trigger is that once you start adapting to it, you can simple shift the watch back to the other wrist and again heighten your awareness. I did something similar a couple of years ago by wearing a necklace. I do not typically wear jewelry, so I was very conscious of it. Each time I noticed me noticing it I would breath a short prayer.
 
Last but not least, one other highly effective variation on this is to carry a trigger in your pocket like a prayer cross, special coin, or other small object. You can always mix up what pocket you keep it in. When I do this I will carry my trigger in my key pocket because it is the pocket I most frequently reach into during the day.
 
If you anyone has other helpful tips or triggers, please share them in the comments. I would love to hear form you.
 
Blessings
 

If you have a recurring sin that you can’t seem to escape, expanding repentance prayers by doing more than just asking for forgiveness can often break the cycle. When you understand that something is wrong (sinful), you pray that you will stop, and yet you don’t, then you have gotten trapped in what I call a sin cycle.
 
The danger of a sin cycle is that it can trap you spiritually from moving forward. You are like a man trying to walk down a path with one foot nailed to the ground. You keep spiraling around that one stuck foot. It feels like you are moving, but at the end of the day you haven’t traveled anywhere.
 
So, why does that happen and how can you break the cycle? Specifically, in this post I want to focus on five ways you might expand and target your prayers so that spike can get pulled out of the ground and start you moving down the path again. First, you need to understand that repentance is a process.
 

The Process of Repentance.

Repentance isn’t simply a matter of asking God to forgive you. There are 5 distinct components. They are:

1. Recognition.–Knowing what you doing is disobedient to God.
2. Confession–Voicing and knowing that you are are responsible for the sin
3. Asking Forgiveness–Just what it sounds like…asking God to forgive you.
4. Feeling Remorse–Having a contrite heart.
5. Changed behavior–Dying to sin and living into Christ.

 
If any piece is lacking then you are likely to either cycle or find a substitute sin.
 

Repentance Prayers

Here is a tool box of repentance prayers that I recommend you use regularly. Each of these prayers fuels a different component of the repentance process.

1) Prayer for Understanding–Pray to know and understand how you are sinning. You can ask God to reveal to you sins that you may be denying, ignoring or justifying. Or, what is actually perhaps even more effective is to regulalry pray for God to help you understand truth. If you understand truth, evil will be obvious.
 
I am reminded of the story of a woman who began working at a bank and was being trained on how to spot counterfeit money. Day after day in painstaking detail she was made to examine authentic bills. They felt the paper and were asked to describe it. They would hold the bills upto the light and examine the watermarks. Under a magnifying glass they would examine the print quality, colors, and ink. Weary of looking at bills, one day she finally said in exasperation, “When are we going to get to see some counterfeit money.” Her trainer simply replied, “Trust me, when you know the real thing, you won’t have any problem recognizing a fake.”
 
For a good biblical example of praying for understanding read Psalm 119. In it the psalmist repeatedly calls upon God to teach him and to bring him greater understanding of God’s precepts, statutes, and commandments.
 
2) Prayers of Confession. When asking forgiveness I would encourage you to not rush too quickly to forgiveness without genuinely slowing down and confessing. In other words, don’t just jump to “Oh God forgive me for doing x, y and z.” Instead, take time to acknowledge and own what you have done, how it is wrong and/or why it is wrong and be specific. For example, let’s say you are struggling with being judgmental over superficial things. You might pray something like, “Oh Lord, when I went to the mall today, nearly ever person I looked at I was immediately making snap judgments about them in my mind based off of what they wore and how they spoke. I sized-up clerks at the grocery store based by their appearance and picked the one that was most acceptable to me. I am so shallow. You love me unconditionally, but I do not do the same for others. When I treat people preferentially I am silently pushing aside others that you have made. They may even be my brothers and sisters in Christ and I am rejecting them. They may be someone I am to love, support them, befriend or learn from and yet, I categorically reject them. Forgive me God.”
 
You get the idea. This specificity is really important because of what I am about to address in the next form of pray.
 
3) Prayers for softening a hardened heart. Knowing something is wrong in your head and feeling remorse can be two totally separate things and both are critical if you are going to actually repent and change your behavior. When I was a kid my younger sister and i would get into fights. My mom would come in from the other room, break it up and interrogate us and try to find out what happen. More specifically, she wanted to ferret out who started it. We usually both gave her a very skewed story; nevertheless, using some God-given super power parents possess of spotting a lie with eerie accuracy, my mom would figure out who was at fault and then tell us those classic words every parent has said at some point, “Say you are sorry.”
 
I don’t ever recall one of us passionately recanting and begging for forgiveness through tear-filled eyes. Almost always, our response was a terse (almost expletive), “Sorry” forcefully spat out with a touch of vehement resentment. Then mom would intone the age old words all parents know, “Say it like you mean it.” We would muster up a more acceptable, “Sorry.” Nothing had changed though. It was the purest form of hypocrisy. A perfect expression of confession without remorse. you can guess the inevitable result…we would begin fighting shortly.
 
Recurring sin is often times a product of confession without remorse. The head and the lips are honoring God but the heart is not. You enter the ranks of those long ago Israelites who offered sacrifices while their hearts were still far from God when you confess with the lips and deny with your future actions. if you do that, like my sister and me, you are almost sure to relapse.
 
The key to breaking this link in the chain binding you is to pray for God to soften your heart and lead you to a place of genuine remorse. At times I must be honest with myself and God and say, “God, I am asking your forgiveness because I know this is wrong in my head, but I do not feel the wrongness of it in my heart. Soften my heart. Bring me to a place where the idea of even considering this sin saddens me deeply. May I come to a place of despising this sin because in doing so I am sinning against you, hurting our relationship and harming myself and others.”
 
Hopefully, you can see now why I said that specificity when confessing is really critical to this form. Taking time to confessing in detail as I described in section two will actually go a long way toward softening your heart. You are conditioning your heart and mind to recognize the consequence of your sin. I find that understanding the consequence of my sin helps me feel greater remorse. Greater remorse turns my heart against sin. While specificity of confession conditions your heart, praying for God to soften your heart invites divine power into that process.
 
4) Prayers committing to a new path. In prayer commit yourself to a new path. Again consider words of the Psalmist in Psalm 119,
 

How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
let me not wander from your commandments!
I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O LORD;
teach me your statutes!
With my lips I declare
all the rules of your mouth.
In the way of your testimonies I delight
as much as in all riches.
I will meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your word.
(Psalm 119:9-16 ESV)

 
Look at that again and listen to the many ways the Psalmist is committing himself to a righteous path. When you confess that you have done something wrong do you vigorously pledge in prayer to follow a new path. For example, regarding my example from above of judging others, you might pray, “Lord God, I will treat all that I meet as if they are Jesus. I will remind myself that you made them and consider each person somehow as your gift to me. I will resist thoughts of judgement and replace those with either prayers of thanksgiving or intercession. I will strive to treat ever person I meet with respect and encouragement. I will honor you in all my contact with others.”
 
Image how much you would retrain your mind if you prayed such a prayer daily or even multiple times a day. Imagine how difficult it would become to judge others if you fostered a mindset of gratitude and humility.
 
Think for a moment about a sin in your life that is a perennial issue for you. What is the exact opposite of that sin? What mindset would you need in place that would eradicate any desire to commit that sin? If you were to promise to God, to pledge to God a new path would would that path be? Think very specifically about what it would be in terms of how you would behave, speak and think.
 
5) Prayers for support. As you move down a new path don’t do it alone. Pray for God to strengthen and guide you. Pray for God to protect you. Pray for God to send you mentors or people who walk along side you. Pray for the anointing of God’s Holy Spirit. Invite God to transform you by renewing your mind.
 

Some much needed qualifying remarks…

Do not treat what I have given you as either self-help advice or a magical formula.
 
Why it’s not self-help advice? Sin is a spiritual matter that has some mechanical aspects to it; however, sin at its heart is a spiritual matter that divides you from God. Only God can restore you to a place of righteousness before him. You won’t work you way back into his good graces, but you can honor God and show your gratitude for all God does by striving to live a Godly life.
 
Why it’s not a magical formula? The prayer suggestions I am making are not some special words you can use to manipulate or control God. These are ways to begin to take seriously the fullness of what it means to truly repent from a sin. These are ways to strategic ways to: address your responsibility for sinning by conditioning your mind, acknowledge your need and dependance upon God to escape sin, and invite God’s power and presence into the process of change.
 
I know from the presence of similar prayers in scripture and from my own experience that a discipline of each of these prayers of repentance can mean the difference between being trapped in sin or free in Christ.
 
I would invite you to pick even just one of these prayers and commit to a discipline of praying it for the next 10 days around a sin in your life that you cannot seem to escape. I welcome you stories and commments.
 
 

1) The greatest teacher of prayer is praying. Don’t get
so caught up in reading about prayer that it becomes
a substitute for praying.

2) The object of prayer is God, not prayer. When learning
new techniques there is a tendency to get so focused on
the technique that you lose track of it being about God. Some
of this is unavoidable for a period. But prayer is a means to
an end not and end in itself. When it becomes an end to itself
it stops being prayer.

3) Don’t judge prayer by the experience of praying, but
rather instead by the change in you over time that it
begins to produce. It’s not important whether or not
you have a mountain top experience. It is important
that you become more Christ like.

May God open you to greater levels of spiritual awareness
and deeper levels of intimacy as you seek to grow in
prayer.

Lastly, I encourage you today to take a few minutes to let
go of the Christmas rush and listen for an Advent hush.
 

I haven’t posted much lately. In fact, I think I had a record stretch of about 10 days without posting. That’s not a record I would like to break. I made numerous false starts at posts and the words just would not come. Sermons were even harder. I opted not to post rather than contrive content. I try not to write unless my heart is in it and it truly feels inspired. That is a waste of my time and yours. A friend of mine suggested that perhaps I was out of words and noted the tremendous amount of content I have produced throughout the year. She said, “May be it’s a time for listening.” Those words resonated deeply within me.
 
I have been living in a season of producing. I won’t bore you with the numbers of posts, sermons, talks, videos, ezine articles, etc. that I have cranked out in the last few months. Suffice it to say, it’s been voluminous now that I reflect on it. I think God is calling me into a season of listening. I have dominated too much of the conversation, so I am growing anemic on what to share. So what do I mean by a ‘season of listening?’
 

Mini-Sabbaths

I am going to spend some blocks of three or four hours where I wander and pray with the emphasis being on predominantly listening. Since moving here two years ago, I have never really establish an outdoor sit spot where I go for prayer and observation. This has always been one of my anchor points with God. I need to reestablish a place and a pattern for my half day personal Sabbaths.
 

Journaling on the Word

My scripture reading is going to shift more towards lectio divina, which is a prayerful way of listening to God through the scriptures. I will journal my observations/interactions with God. This tends to make me more mindfully present to God in general.
 

Centering Prayer

Centering prayer is an old tradition of listening to God that is very contemplative. I am not going to commit to a daily discipline of centering at this time, but will be leaning on God through it with some frequency. Few things ground me more deeply in God than centering prayer.
 

Does this mean I will be posting less?

I don’t think so. In fact, seasons of listening are often times great times of inspiration. Ironically, I may find myself posting more. We will see.

 
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I suspect that I miss alot of the times when God is speaking. Sometimes I am not looking. Sometimes I am distracted. And if truth be told, sometimes I am avoiding God. It doesn’t happen too often that I am avoiding God, but every once in a while I get in a slump of sorts and find myself resisting time with God. When I am listening though here are ten ways I have noticed God responding to prayer.
 

1. Through the Word

I had a friend who was growing in prayer and one of the first conscious experiences of knowng God was trying to speak to him came when he had verses of Scripture ‘coincidentally’ come across his path in rapid succession. For example, he would pray about something and a verse would pop up in his life three times in the next 24 hours from totally divergent sources. The phenemonon recurred enough eventually he could no longer call it coincidence. I don’t necessarily experience a single scripture multiple times, but it is not unusual for me to pray about a concern only to find in my devotional reading the exact guidance, inspiration, comfort or conviction that I need.
 

2. Through people

God will use people to speak to you. Someone will share a story or call you just when you need it the most. Don’t be surprised if you pray for guidance and God sends you a person with the answer to your question.
 

3. Peace that passes all understanding

When I am facing a choice I often times sit in prayer with both options before me. Often times there is a very clear sense of peace about one choice over another. You can almost physically sense this peace. For me it is much like the sensation of release you have when you struggle to remember something and then it comes.  That sense of knowing is important to listen to.
 

4. Through signs

Scripture speaks many times of signs. I recall when I was considering my ministry call to Texarkana. I felt very confused. I had been through some similar searches with dissappointing and confusing results. I was beginning to doubt my ability to know where God was calling me. Twenty four hours before I went to my second interview and knew that the committee was going to be asking me to come to this church, I went off to my sit spot in the woods to pray. I prayed for a good hour. I finally said, “God, I need some clear undeniable sign to guide me in this. I am not certain what you want me to do.  I need it before we go to that interview tomorrow.”   That evening a member of the church, who was unaware of my situation, called to tell me that he had been on vacation and kept feeling like God wanted him to call me and tell me something.  Specifically he said, “You need to leave. You will never be able to fully use your gifts here. It’s time to go. I don’t want you to leave, but you need to leave.” That to me was a pretty undeniable sign. There was no ambiquity whatsoever.
 

5. Through dreams

Scripture contains many examples of God speaking to people through dreams. God will warn, comfort, and instruct through dreams. I have had a couple of experiences in which God spoke rather dramatically to me through dreams. Dreams from God have an uncharacteristic clarity to them. They are so vivid that they feel more like memories than dreams.
 

6. Visions

Visions like dreams are revelatory experiences attested to by Scripture.  They are also similar to dreams in that they tend to be extremely vivid.  If you have not expereinced a dream or visions by God you might be prone to think of these as extremely subjective.  The qualitative difference though between a revelatory experience of God and ordinary dreams or thoughts is undeniably distinct.
 

7. Circumstance

When you pray for guidance, it is wise to pay attention to what opportunities open up and which ones close.  Sometimes God leads us by opening and closing doors.
 

8. No, not now

God doesn’t seem to always respect my day timer.  I recall asking God for guidance on a retreat once about my vocation. Through a series of signs God slowly answered my prayer, but took three years to do it. Each sign was quite obviously from God, but each one only pointed me forward to the next step. All of the pieces didn’t clearly make sense until three years later and then the chain of response was evident.
 

9. No, not in the way you expect

I often times make very specific prayers to God. I find specificity to be very helpful. However, I always try to stay open to God answering in ways I never expected. I call it coming before God with an open hand agenda. I try to make a very clear request, but I don’t hold on too tightly. I know that God is capable of exceeding my thoughts on what is best. I do my best to trust.
 

10. No

Some Christian authors are very hesitant to say that God says ‘no.’  I am confident that God knows best and at times  my request is contrary to God’s will and God says ‘no.’  That’s okay.  When God says ‘no’ or I can’t see God’s ‘yes’ that is when I turst and lean on God the most.
 

11.  A resounding undeniable ‘Yes’

I recall praying once about about needing a mentor and a mentee.  Within an hour my phone rang and a young man called and asked if he could come shadow me at work because he was considering going into ministry.  Shortly after that I had lunch with a man who volunteered to mentor me in a massive project that I had undertaken.  Neither of these people were people I sought out.  They spontaneously asked to be mentor and to be my  mentor. 
 
These are  not the only ways God responds.  I am sure that you can think of others, but I hope by reflecting on these you will be influenced to be actively looking more closely for God’s  presence in your life.

Peace from The Practical Disciple

Giving Thanks

Today was the first day of school for my children. All the prep was finished late last night. First day clothes were selected and laid out. I made a quick run to the store for a couple of items that still needed to go in backpacks. The most important preparation of all was prayer. Just before bed we all gathered in our room. The kids and mom piled up on the bed. We took a few minutes to first take turns giving thanks for the summer. Everyone shared favorite memories with God and one another via a prayer.
 

Painting a Picture

Next, we shifted to praying for one another for the school year. We took turns. We prayed for good friends, good grades and good times. We lifted up new experiences and asked for the best. We prayed for protection and guidance. Through prayer we painted a picture of our hopes for the new year. Everyone prayed for everyone. We were very specific in our prayers. Our prayers reflected the unique nature of individual hopes and fears as we stand on the threshold of a new year. It was a great way to go into the year.
 

A Prayer Answered

Today, when I picked up my son and asked him how the day went, he felt it went very well. We were concerned about a conflict in his schedule. The available changes weren’t very appealing. He was really excited when he got in the car because he discovered that he misunderstood what one of the classes was and that he really liked it. He told me how cool the class was. I reminded him that the night before his mother had prayed that this problem would have some cool creative solution. A cool creative solution came that we never saw. We talked about how we should respond when prayers are answered. I encouraged him to give thanks for a quickly answered prayer. It was a mentoring moment in recognizing God at work. It was a mentoring moment in thinking about how we should respond.
 
If you have children that you can pray for and with about school. I highly encourage you to gather for a few minutes as a family to do it. We had never done this as a family at the beginning of the year. You can bet it will become a beloved tradition now.
 
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Any prayer discipline can be improved just by applying a few prayer tips.

1)  Schedule your prayer time. You can prayer at anytime and all the time, but have you set aside a time just to be with God?  We make time for what is important and having a daily time just for God improves your consistency.

2)  Pray outloud. I use to like to pray on long drives.  Unfortunately, I found that my mind frequently wandered, until I started praying out loud.  I am sure some passing motorist thought I was crazy talking to myself because this pre-dated handsfree cell phone devices.  Neverthess, I found that I could sustain my attention if I would just pray outload.

3) Pray on paper. Writing your prayers out will physically engage you in prayer like praying outloud.  Journaling your prayers not only will help you maintain focus, but I find that the process of writing is very clarifying. If you are not sure where to start on writing prayers, try just writing a letter to God.  ”Dear God, ….”

4) Use a devotional guide. Using a prayer guide will prompt you to pray for things you normally wouldn’t.  One my favorites is a little book called a A Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie.  It’s an inexpensive paperback that provides morning and evening prayers for a month along with blank pages to write your own prayers.  While the language is a bit dated the spirit of the writing is so amazingly fresh.

5) Pray with someone. Particularly, having a small prayer group can be a very powerful experience.  Be sure that you spend the bulk of your time actually in prayer.  I have been in prayer groups that rapidly became discussion groups about prayer and then spent only a few minutes actually praying. Some groups passively resist moving into prayer by spending a long time gather prayer requests from one another.

6) Keep a prayer list. Do you ever tell someone you are going to pray for them and then forget about it until you see them again?  You had all the greatest intentions in the world, but just forgot. Keeping a prayer list can help prevent this from happening.  A prayer list also prompts you to watch for how God is responding.  It hones your spiritual awareness.

7) Be sure to listen.  Have you ever been in a one-sided conversation with someone who can’t shut-up?  Make sure that you aren’t being that person with God.  Learn to take time in your prayers to be still and listen.  If your not sure what that might look like read the post, Do we really expect God to answer?.

You don’t need to do all of these at once.  Pick one or two prayer tips and periodically mix up your prayer life in order to keep your awareness high.  The key is to stay very intentional in your prayer life so you don’t fall into a rut.  In fact, take that as a bonus tip…

Mix it Up.

My prayer for you is that you experience ever deepening conversations with God. Blessings from The Practical Disciple

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