{"id":3831,"date":"2012-04-21T16:07:25","date_gmt":"2012-04-21T23:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/?p=3831"},"modified":"2012-04-21T16:07:25","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T23:07:25","slug":"some-thoughts-on-extemporaneous-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/?p=3831","title":{"rendered":"Some Thoughts on Extemporaneous Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeanne of Knowledge Hungry<\/a> talked about some habits she wanted to change in her life<\/a> and one of them was prayer. Quoting her:<\/p>\n

Prayer. I have a habit of praying, to be sure. I pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily (morning, evening and night prayer), and I pray the Rosary at least four days a week. I??d like to pray the Rosary every day. Some weeks I do, but others I slack off. I??d also like to improve my ??informal communication?? with God in spontaneous prayer.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Being Lutheran, I can’t exactly help her with the Rosary other than suggesting she maybe schedule times to pray it in a day planner. (That would, at least, be my strategy.) I can, however, talk about spontaneous or extemporaneous prayer. It’s something I’ve seen some of the #Cathsorority ladies talking about on Twitter<\/a> and as one who seems to be doing that kind of prayer most of the time these days, I’ve got a few suggestions for those who want them.<\/p>\n

Oh yes… I should also mention that I’m a huge fan of liturgical prayer like Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline (night prayer). Lutherans do have these in our hymnals. (Trust me… I’ve done all three.)<\/p>\n

[+] The way I seem to be doing much my extemporaneous praying these days is going through my blogroll. Not all the sites are blogs (most aren’t) but I still hit a number of personal sites. I have Brett (my Reece’s Rainbow<\/a> child) in it so I pray for him when I hit his donation page. Another way it will happen is going through my Google reader<\/a>. I might happen to see that Anna<\/a> is having problems so I’ll pray for whatever those problems are, whether they be emotional or issues with her leucine levels. (She has MSUD <\/a>and is waiting for a liver transplant.) Her mom has a blog set up for the whole transplant process and it helps me to know how to pray for her and for Anna.<\/p>\n

[+] If I know something is coming up, I might put it in a scheduler on my laptop so I can look at it and see who needs specific prayers that day. Example: Katie of NFP and Me<\/a> will be taking her boards in a couple months and if she tells me the date(s) (hint hint hint), I can put it in my scheduler and make sure I pray for her that day. I do the same thing if someone tells me that they’ve got a really tough doctor’s appointment or if someone tells me that they have another thing in their life scheduled that needs prayer.<\/p>\n

[+] Twitter<\/a> is another way I do the above two. I read my tweets pretty fanatically and if someone expresses something that I think deserves my attention, I’ll say a short prayer about it. For those wanting some words, I usually say something like this when someone is sick or has a medical issue: “Lord, you are our Great Physician and the healer of our souls. Bless _____________ and restore them to good health. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.”<\/p>\n

This is how I do it. How do you do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeanne of Knowledge Hungry talked about some habits she wanted to change in her life and one of them was prayer. Quoting her: Prayer. I have a habit of praying, to be sure. I pray the Liturgy of the Hours … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-life","category-faith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p38xoO-ZN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-filled.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}