a year of habits// week 1: Prayer

I feel like prayer is so powerful and yet so vastly underrated.  Throughout the week I kept thinking that one week just wasn't enough to study and create habits from.

And then.....

The last day of my week of prayer ended on Saturday and right before closing the shop we had a couple of customers come in that had just been to a prayer conference here in Jax.  We spent a good amount of time talking about how wonderful prayer is and all the types of praying there is: on your own, with another Christian, with a group, for healing, for peace, for confession, etc.
So now I know what I want to my week of study to be on!!! Prayer. I'm already excited.


And while prayer is one of my favorite faith disciplines, this week I've been made to realize that I don't do it as frequently as I thought. My habit for this week was to pray before every meal. Considering the fact that I really only eat once a day I thought this would be easy enough to accomplish.  But out of 7 days, only 1 day was completely successful.

So what did this teach me?

Besides realizing that what was once a habit is definitely not anymore, I've also come to the conclusion that I don't have God at the forefront like I thought I did.
Instead of beating myself up though, I decided to include another prayer- that God would help me but Him first. Maybe that's what this habit was suppose to teach me all along anyway- to remind me that even the simple things I need God. There is not one single habit that I will be able to do successfully all the time, without God's help and guidance.

The best part about making this my first habit of the year, is that I still have 51 weeks to make it work.



NEXT week's habit is on Confession.
I think the habit I am going to work on developing for the next 51 weeks for this discipline will be to journal my confessions to God. There are times when instead of admitting what's bothering me I bottle it up.  So this next week I'm going to start trying to journal those times and also in the times when I don't feel like I'm drastically in offense to God. I want to surrender everything to Him and I also don't want to hold back from doing what He wants of me.

What is your habit for next week???

xo,
kel