Lenten Devotions

Saturday, February 23

Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me! “Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, LORD, do I seek. Do not hide your face from me.
Psalm 27: 7-9

I’ve been reading Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today by Scot McKnight. It should be back in the church library by Sunday if you want to take a look at it. Look on the shelves right inside the door where there is a shelf full of books that we recommend for Lent.

The book is about the ancient practice of the church to stop at different periods of the day for prayer. Actually, this was a practice of the Jews in the time of Jesus and long before. This daily rhythm of corporate prayer would have been part of Jesus’s experience.

When I read Kathleen Norris’s book Amazing Grace in which she wrote about praying the daily offices with the Benedictine monks at the abbey, I remember I felt jealous. How lovely to stop everything and go pray. What a luxury, I thought.

Well, yes, and no. A precious luxury, but not one that is so far out of reach. I can’t go to an abbey, perhaps, but I can have sacred spaces of prayer throughout my day. I can. Instead of marking time with meals (I’m afraid I spend a significant amount of time thinking about what I’m going to eat next), what if I marked time by prayer. What are natural transition points in my day?

I already try to pray before the children get up. There’s one. Another time might be in the afternoon when it’s just Sarah and I, and she’s playing and the other girls aren’t home from school yet. Then there’s the time, the blessed quiet, of the time when the children are in bed and I have thanked God for them and stillness settles upon our home. That would be a good time for prayer.

Yes, what if I measured my day by times of prayer? What would that feel like? Wouldn’t that delight God in some small way? Wouldn’t that help me keep my God in the center of my heart?

What do you think?

An Idea for a Practice

So, if you wanted to break prayer into your day, how would you do it? You could pick two times in each day to read a psalm or a piece of psalm (119 is really, really long). You could work your way through the prayer book of the Bible in about two and a half or three months that way.

There are lots of wonderful prayer books that you could use. Some are set up with daily prayers and prayers to say at intervals throughout the day.

There is a neat website that I found by doing a little surfing: www.missionstclare.com. If you click “Today’s Prayer Service” you get a beautiful but long time of prayer. You can click below that on “Families and Individuals” and that will take you to much briefer offerings for each day in the morning, at noon, early evening, and close of day.

What would be fun to try?

For more information or to continue the conversation, write to Katie at katherinekinnison@covenantpcusa.org.

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