Week One: A House of Prayer
Welcome to my series, The Three Months of Joy. I am using Ann Voskamp's Parenting Manifesto of Joy as inspiration and will be posting on each of the ten bullet points (focusing on one each week for ten weeks). Love to have you join!
Making prayer a habit. A ritual. Something we do every day.
But not so often that we don't listen to what we're saying.
I've struggled with prayer. I don't like to pray just for the sake of it. To me, conversation of any kind needs to be deep. It needs to serve a purpose. I don't want to just come up with something to say because I have to. Because I should.
But if we are going to make our home a house of prayer and help our children find that space where God lives, where we can live too, prayer must become something routine. Or we may not remember to pray at all.
Meals can be chaotic. The younger child gets hungry before the older...you peel him an orange, then get out some crackers while the soup is cooking. Then the older wants a bowl of cereal instead of soup and you find yourself pouring milk and getting the baby down for a nap. Mom eats soup later by herself and thinks...
We didn't pray.
Do we need sticky notes all through the house to remind us?
We want to make a habit of praying during our morning circle time. At meals. At evening family time. At bedtime. And any other time we want to.
We want to want to.
And I believe that takes practice.
Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience writes in her article "How to Build a House of Prayer" that "establishing a time establishes Who is the priority".
Nine, twelve, and six. That makes sense.
We thank Him, we make our requests, we pray for others, we ask Him to be with us.
I'll get my pad of sticky notes.
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Making prayer a habit. A ritual. Something we do every day.
But not so often that we don't listen to what we're saying.
I've struggled with prayer. I don't like to pray just for the sake of it. To me, conversation of any kind needs to be deep. It needs to serve a purpose. I don't want to just come up with something to say because I have to. Because I should.
But if we are going to make our home a house of prayer and help our children find that space where God lives, where we can live too, prayer must become something routine. Or we may not remember to pray at all.
1. Today, I will make our home a house of prayer. I will pray at set times.
And I will invite our children to come move into an interior space that lives with God.
Meals can be chaotic. The younger child gets hungry before the older...you peel him an orange, then get out some crackers while the soup is cooking. Then the older wants a bowl of cereal instead of soup and you find yourself pouring milk and getting the baby down for a nap. Mom eats soup later by herself and thinks...
We didn't pray.
Do we need sticky notes all through the house to remind us?
We want to make a habit of praying during our morning circle time. At meals. At evening family time. At bedtime. And any other time we want to.
We want to want to.
And I believe that takes practice.
Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience writes in her article "How to Build a House of Prayer" that "establishing a time establishes Who is the priority".
Nine, twelve, and six. That makes sense.
We thank Him, we make our requests, we pray for others, we ask Him to be with us.
I'll get my pad of sticky notes.
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Want to join in?? I'll be posting about prayer this week, you can too!
Want to join in?? I'll be posting about prayer this week, you can too!