Avoid My Common #Prayerfail

I’ve been tempted not to write about prayer lately, as I have felt like I am not the best source for insight into the topic. I feel like instituting the hashtag #prayerfail.

Life has been busy, and in the busy one of the things I have often unintentionally trimmed is prayer time. It’s strange, because I fully acknowledge that this is not an area I want to neglect. In my mind, it’s a non-negotiable. But in practice, it’s a different story…

One of my issues is that I try to pray first thing in the morning, before the rest of my family wakes up. But as a dad with small kids, mornings sometimes start earlier than you plan. So what is my fallback plan?

Therein lies the problem.

It’s good to plan- it’s essential, actually, for those who want to consistently succeed. But every good plan needs contingency plans. A plan where there is only one possible chance of success is a desperate plan, and I’ve been approaching prayer in a desperate way.

As I write this it seems so obvious, but it still trips me up. Somedays I miss the 6:15am appointment, and there is no make up meeting. But where else in life do things work like that? If you miss breakfast, do you say, “Well, I guess I may as well not eat today.” If you miss a morning chat with your spouse, do you say “Well, that ship has sailed. I’ll have to tell her I love her tomorrow morning. Or maybe the next day...” 

How about you? Do you pray less often than you’d like? Do you have a set time to pray? What’s your plan B?

My wife and I remind each other regularly that we will be pretty ineffective in the New Evangelization if we don’t keep conversation with God as a prime focus in our day. As a reader of this blog, I am guessing that you want to be effective in evangelization as well.

We talk about witness as a precursor to evangelization a lot, and Pope Francis spoke the other day about Christian fraternity as a key to witness.

“This fraternity, however, presupposes the fatherhood of God and the motherhood of the Church and of the Virgin Mary,” he said. “We must each day place ourselves once again in this relationship, and we can do so with prayer, the Eucharist, with adoration, with the Rosary.”

Let us persevere in placing ourselves in this relationship. God desires it, and we need it. And let us also remember these cautionary words from St. Josemaria Escriva:

"If you abandon prayer you may at first live on spiritual reserves, and after that, by cheating."