JEI {3}: Prayer

Welcome to the weekly link up, Just Enough Info (JEI).  The internets can be a great source of community, and I’d love to get to know you better!  Feel free to share your answers in the comments or link up if you have a blog.  You can see our first link up here.

 

JEI {3}:  Prayer

1.What are your favorite devotions?

I like the rosary.  I like lectio divina.

My kids have enjoyed the Devotional Stories for Little Folks series.

We pray the popular prayers as a family, and David wrote a prayer that he and I try to say every night before bed when we don’t just immediately collapse from exhaustion.
2.Have any of your prayers been answered? Do you have any prayers that you are glad weren’t answered the way you’d hoped?

This question gives me pause.
This question makes me a little nauseous.
This question does not have a quick answer.  (Actually, I could come up with a quick answer if you want to fast forward through the messy parts to the ***)

There are two reasons for the messiness.

Reason #1:  I have such a lovely life that thinking about this question makes me sheepishly realize how little I am grateful.  How as soon as a prayer is answered, it’s immediately forgotten.  Like the man who prays for a parking space but says as soon as he finds one, “Oh, that’s okay, God.  I’ve found one.”  Once the worry is gone, the thought is, too.  In thinking about all the things I’ve prayed for that have turned out okay, the list is huge.

• little issues with having a house and a family
• medical issues of friends and family
• healthy babies of friends and family (and ourselves!)
• “making it work” financially on one income
• innumerable sticky situations in general

Turns out I’m kind of…one of the nine lepers who doesn’t come back.  That’s awkward.  I’ve heard of people having a gratitude journal, and maybe that’s what I need to do, too.  Keep a prayer journal.

That leads to #2.

Reason #2:  Sometimes prayers aren’t answered in the way we expect.  Watching Cee suffer…oh, how she has suffered in her little life.  Nothing I did took away the pain.  The loss of control, the feeling of being completely unable to help her – – it doesn’t get much worse than that as a mother.  Not being able to touch her because it hurt too much…  It’s taken conscious effort not to just throw in the towel.

I wish I had a response to the prayers that go seemingly unanswered.  I know that I’m a better person from having weathered that storm.  That I see people and life through a different lens after watching Cee waste away.  There have been good fruits.

A big breakthrough for me came during confession a couple years ago.  The priest helped me think about my struggle — if I was trying to “play by God’s rules,” but He who is able to act miraculously doesn’t…what does that mean?  If I pray for a miracle and God says no…what does that mean?  I had to consider my subconscious “health and wealth Gospel” faith.  God still loves me, even if the answer isn’t what I want or hope.

It hasn’t been all daisies and roses since that realization, but it has gotten marginally easier.  Cee is doing better now, and that helps, but it still hasn’t been the miracle I hoped for.  Her last medication worked for a year and half, then suddenly stopped.  We’re at about a year and a half of her disease being under control with her new medication.  I’ll let you read between the lines so I don’t have to type out the rest of that thought.

I guess, it’s okay not to understand.  To trust.  To pray for peace.

 

***David commuted 1.5 hours each way to a job for three years.  It was tough.  Eventually the distance got to be too much, but there weren’t many closer openings at the time.  It was beyond frustrating.  Do you remember when gas was $4 a gallon?  We lived through that when David was driving 120+ miles a day.

We stumbled across the Our Lady, Undoer of Knots novena and decided to do one for David’s job situation.  He had an interview and an offer almost immediately after finishing the novena.  That’s the nice, tidy answer to prayer we like all like to hear about.
3. How do you pray with your kids?

Our standard prayers are before meals, before bed, any time we hear a helicopter or sirens, and at Mass.  We’ve made half-hearted attempts to say a family rosary, and now that the kiddos are older it might be time to try again.  After reading this post about kids and faith, I want to try to incorporate more spontaneous prayer as well.

Now it’s your turn!  Answer these three questions on your blog (making sure to link back here!) and submit.

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Be sure to visit my JEI co-hosts Jessica, Kirby, and Kerry and any other linker-uppers this week.  🙂