Letting Other People Speak For Me

Some time last year I acknowledge that I have feeble, weak and anemic prayer life.  Not a crazy or shocking revelation, but an honest one none the less.  It stemmed from wanting to be more connected to God and yet not being able to talk with him or express my heart and mind to him.  After reading Scot McKinght's Praying with the Church, I decided to do something to strengthen my prayer life.

The course I took was to write out and memorize some prayers.  Some were Scripture (Ps. 22 and the Lord's Prayer) and some where not. The point was to have something to say to God right on the tip of my tongue and to develop a routine of regular prayer. This worked great for a while, but after losing my flash cards I fell out of practice and forgot most of what I memorized.

However, this week I picked up the practice again. I started with a prayer I wanted to pray every morning:

"Lord, God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought me in safety to this new day.  Persevere me with your might power so that I may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by adversity and in all I do direct me into the fulfilling your purpose through Jesus Christ, my Lord, Amen."

Its not long or fancy, but it has had an impact on me even though I started memorizing it just this week. Here's how:

1. Memorizing prayer have given me a better sense of connection with God.  This prayer is better than one I could written or recited, thus allowing my heart to express, with someone else's words, what I could not pull together.
2. I find myself coming back to this prayer several times a day.  Just in the quest to memorize it, I am practicing it when my mind has idol time or is just wandering.  It is interesting, I find myself thinking more about God and talking with him than I did before.
3. This prayer will at some point serve as a model for me as I strengthen my prayers and and I return to freestyle prayers.
4. I don't know where this prayer originated, I got from a Phyllis Tickle's book The Divine Hours:Prayers for Autumn and Winter, but for some reason I feel connected to a larger community who may be praying this same prayer.  I feel more connected to the history of the faith I shared with millions of people throughout the world and throughout history.
5. I believe this prayer is adding to spiritual development. It feels healthy to growth in that which is good and right, instead of always lamenting my arrested development and sin.

Hopefully this time I will not lose my flash cards, but continue in this discipline or prayer and memorization.