The First 30 Days
If you haven’t read the previous blog post, about my “80 Days of Firsts,” make sure you catch up so you know what this is all about!
The first of these 30 days, I’ve been participating in a prayer challenge that one of my closest friends is leading. The goal- well, grow closer to God of course! How? By diving deep with some interpersonal questions and weekly prayer challenges meant to grow our prayer lives.
The first week’s challenge was simple, spend 15 straight minutes in prayer with God.
Easy, right?
Not as easy as one would think!
I found how difficult it is to dedicate 15 uninterrupted, consecutive minutes to God at the foot of his throne. It was an incredibly humbling week to say the least.
It’s astounding to me that I can easily say yes to 15 minutes of almost any other activity, rather than communication with my Lord. What an icky feeling.
I believe that the timing of this is so incredible- this will be great practice to imbed the habit of daily, intentional, prayer time NOW while I have three busy little kids running laps around me, to really soak up the upcoming five kid-free days coming up at the end of the spring!
There truly is no excuse for my inability to stay focused. The technological advances of our modern age have really done a doozy on all of us. I’ve been watching the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” to continue learning about the impacts of social media on my brain, and it’s been sobering.
I need to protect my mind!
It’s so hard to grow an attention span when I am dousing my brain in dopamine on the daily with quick hits of semi-mindless entertainment.
I’m halfway through this challenge, and I can honestly say focusing for 15 minutes at a time, daily is getting easier, but it’s still a challenge. One thing that has helped me is that I realized on the YouVersion Bible App, on the Daily Refresh Guided Prayer segment, if I play the harmonic background music, one loop lasts for five minutes.
With this hack, I am not thinking about a clock counting down, or having to look at anything. The soothing white noise is so helpful to me for focused prayer!
For the remaining 15 days, I’ve been feeling encouraged and pressed to, “ask.” For what, I can think of a handful of things, but I realize I really want to broaden my, “asks,” beyond people’s salvations and meeting my own goals. I want to learn to ask the Father who he wants me to be, and to shed light in the dark places of my soul, to help me seek out how to grow out of them. I want to really deepen my prayer life from here out, and to do that, I think I’m going to re-read this devotional as well as read this book!
I went through this devotional in 2021, and I think I could definitely use a refresher!
Stay tuned for the 50 remaining days of my “80 days of firsts.” I anticipate having a weight-loss update on it, and also sharing what the Lord is going to lead me to next!
