Katie's prayer: Cheer Up Charlie's "Not Moving"

A broken heart and life that’s willing

It’s almost Honest Friday, so time for some honesty. Today is really only the second time I’ve prayed with the prayanewsong method since my last post. Continuing to pray this way without the motivation behind people will know if I didn’t pray just wasn’t happening as planned. I was actually beginning to fool myself and think that I was ok with it. That I prayed other ways. Maybe my backing away was really God’s way of telling me it was time to move on completely from the project.

Then tonight happened. Tonight I was awakened to my horrible human ways. I went to a talk on lukewarmness. If you’ve never read anything from St. John Vianni on lukewarmness, you need to - very humbling stuff. What I read made me realize that maybe I wasn’t so great with God as I’ve fooled myself to believe. Maybe I really do have lots of work to do. And at one point in the talk, the speaker was saying that the devil likes to trick us into thinking that the praying all day method is enough. A second here, a minute there, always keeping God on your mind is enough. The speaker was saying that no, it’s not enough. You need to have time every day where you sit down and you actually pray. You don’t do anything else but pray. It’s not that the praying all day, while driving, while working, while doing whatever is wrong. It’s just that by itself, it is. And that’s when it hit me... prayanewsong was my time when I sat down and prayed, did nothing but pray. And without that, I was getting trapped in the praying all day method and thinking that it was ok. Almost even to the fact that I was going to give this up completely because I thought I was just fine without it.

Well tonight’s talk gave me lots to think about with how to change my life. One of those changes, that God made perfectly clear for me, was that I needed to get back to praying and just praying daily. But I still feel the need to keep some of my prayers private. It’s going to be difficult to get back into the habit of praying while still knowing that if I don’t want to, I don’t have to post it. But as Tom Hanks says in a League of their own - It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everybody would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.