Welcome to pandemic prayer tips with Sarah!
In prayer we get to have a conversation with God. We are able to talk to the creator of EVERYTHING, the maker of life, love incarnate, and he wants to talk to us about our day, about our fears and struggles and pains and hurts. He wants us to sit and talk to him like our closest friends, he wants us to spill the tea. Maybe in your prayer life you arent at the stage where you want to tell God EVERYTHING, and thats okay, the first part of prayer is knowing that God will meet you where you’re at. He is going to meet you where you are, and will offer his hand to you, to take you deeper, but he will never force you beyond your limits. Now some common prayer tips in general. The first thing to do to deepen your prayer life is to have one. Whatever it looks like, if it's for 5 minutes a day or an hour. Just have something. Make a daily decision to talk to God, maybe most days it's journaling and some days it's talking to him out loud when you wake up. Whatever it is, make time to talk to him every day. I highly recommend making it a part of a routine, maybe it's right before you go to sleep, maybe it's right when you wake up, before you get ready. It may take you a while to figure out when it is best to schedule prayer into your day. And it probably looks different now, maybe you used to pray on the bus to school, so be aware that throughout your life the time in which you pray will change, based on careers, age, like even vocation. Your prayer life is like regular life, and it will change as you do, so don’t freak out that it’s different now. After that, if you have been doing well with regularly talking to God I encourage you to try to go a bit deeper, lengthen the time you talk. Add a few more minutes and start to lengthen the time you give yourself for prayer. Another way is by switching up what you do, read scripture, read a spiritual book, journal, write down all your thoughts and if you feel like there's a response to your thought write that down, maybe its God speaking maybe it's yourself but in writing it down you can begin to note if there are differences in the words, the tone and everything like that. Okay so straight up we are in a struggle of a time, there are so many differences in our daily routine, prayer is getting shaken up. Even mass, having mass be online and in your living room makes it a lot harder to pray and focus and be prayerful. The reason why mass is different at home is because when you are home in front of your tv you do things in a certain way, your brain is like i'm in the living room at the couch this is where I lay down and even though you are listening to a priest read the gospel and part of you is like...i stand..now? Your brain is like...but the couch...the laying couch...the couch where I lay down. In youth ministry we use this. When we are in a space and we play games in a certain spot, the best way to keep attention is to change the location from where you give talks to where you play games, because when even the background is shifted our brains will comprehend something new is happening. We have to change what we look at to change our natural reaction. In short there is a lot of CHANGE happening right now that we can't control. Change is scary, more often than not, change makes us scared and intimidated because we aren't use to it and with change can easily come fear. Fear of the unknown is the most common denominator in a lot of issues in the world, from racism and prejudice to avoiding counselling. Change shifts things, but that doesn't mean change is bad. Change is just different and new, and within that holds many opportunities. When we change the way we see things we can experience a new understanding, like the expression walking a mile in someone else's shoes. We will see things in a new light and sometimes that light is better than what we knew before. But if we never change perspectives we’ll never know. In the gospel this past Sunday, we talked about Jesus healing a man from blindness. This man was blind since birth, and Jesus comes to him and asks him do you want to be healed? The first reaction is like….uh duh..like obviously Jesus im BLIND. That would be dope to see and no longer have to beg….i could get a job, I could be part of society, aside from just being able to see in general it would change my whole life! Of course he wants to see! Yet Jesus still asks him. We often will ask God to help us in prayer, to help us to take time to pray, or have a better prayer life, and oh look what happens we have more free time. How are we responding? Spending more time on social media, laying in our bed scrolling through our phone. When we ask for things from God we often don't understand the fullness of what it will look like. What we would be gaining, the good and the bad. It goes back to Adam and Eve, the fruit from the tree of understanding of good and evil, didnt just mean that they would intellectually know evil, it meant that they would have the ability to commit evil, they now would know what evil was and willingly choose to act on it. And with that choice, they had to lose the fruit from the tree of eternity, they now couldn't live forever because of the evil that now entered their heart. Cue Jesus dying for our sins to pay the debt we owe to still be with us for eternity after death, and here we are. So back to this blind man, he said yes, and he was now able to see such beauty, he could smiles, and laughter, he could see colours, and shapes, the beauty of a sunset, the stunning nature surrounding the Jordan river, he could see all these things of beauty, of Gods creation, but now he could also see sin. He could see injustice being done, he could see jealousy, he could see hatred and disgust, he could see lust, and resentment. His life changed in that moment. His eyes were open, and he could now see reality, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. When we deepen our prayer, when we ask God to show us more of himself, the same thing is going to happen to us. Jesus is going to ask us are you sure? Is this what you want? The more time we spend with Christ the more we will see things in the fullness of his light. The shadows that cover our sin because we are unaware of it, the shadows that cover wounds that we have ignored, when God comes deeper into ourselves, he is going to bring about change in our life. When we accept God into our life, when we want to grow closer to Him we can trust that he is going to change our life. Yes that is going to be good, it will be beautiful and powerful, our life will know a whole new meaning, we will have strength from knowing to give it all to God, and we will have comfort and consolation in the deepest of despairs but we will also be hated.The more time we spend with God the more like him we will be, and in that the more united we will be to his cross. Jesus told us to pick up our cross and follow him, so no it won't be easy, but it will be worth it. It won't just affect how we see others, how we notice and see these sins like the blind man now could, but now he could see how he could sin. So when our eyes are open to a new truth, we may realize a lie we believe, when God shows us new depths of love, we may see the ways we aren't loving. The point isn't to have us just sit there in defeat, Jesus doesn't show us it to be like LOOK AT WHAT YOU COULD HAVE….but you don't. Like thank you celebrities singing imagine to me….instead of singing imagine no possessions, why dont you sell some of yours to pay for more ventilators for hospitals so everyone can get the help they need. That was a side tangent...where was I, yes Jesus doesn't open our eyes for us to see ways we have failed, but ways that we can grow. Satan will try to convince us we have already failed, that we can't go from this, that we can't go beyond this, and that we will fail. God will show us what we can do, and meet us where we are at to help us get there. Jesus is the trainer and Satan is the critic. Which voice are you listening to? To close this time I want to encourage you all to pray daily. You are going to mess up. You are going to fail at that, and that's okay. It doesn't matter how many times we fall, but how many times we get back up. If you need help to pray every day, get an accountability partner. Be partners with someone who will ask you daily how prayer is, that simple question will lovingly call you out to pray.
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