“You can tell God anything,” said Rowena. I didn’t believe her. It was a sunny day in the park with the Children’s Ministry, and Rowena was one of my Sunday school teachers. I didn’t think she was serious. God couldn’t possibly be interested in just anything I say, could He?
I found this:
Diary entry from October 24, 1997 reads, “Oh yeah! God, please take out my sins & hatred & fill my heart with love. Please. I ask these through Your Son, Jesus Amen.”
It’s the first time (in my first diary) I wrote directly to God. I would have been 12 years old. This is the earliest record I have of me writing to God, and that’s just…so cool to me! đ
There was a point in my life where I was hardly praying. I only prayed out of desperation or guilt, not because I wanted to spend time with God. You know how people say that habits are hard to break. That’s true for spiritual disciplines, like prayer.
By the time I had spiritually gotten up and off my rock bottom, I wanted to pray and spend time with God just because. But it had become my habit to fill up my time with useless activities. It had become habit to grab something else when I wanted to grab my Bible. It had become habit to rationalize that I had time at the end of the day to pray. Then the end of the day would come and it had become habit to convince myself I would pray in the morning even though I am not a morning person.
It was so hard to break the habit of putting God off, and of placing Him last on my To-Do list if He ever gets on there in the first place. Then one day, I started writing down my prayers.
I’ve written down prayers before, but not like this. Not in the same way I would talk to Him. What I would pray out loud (and sometimes, I said the words out loud as I wrote them down), I wrote down. Words of praise and adoration. Asking for forgiveness. Confessed sins. How my day went. Desires of my heart. Doubts. Questions. I would pause from writing to spend a few minutes speaking in tongues (Hi I’m Angela and I’m a Pentecostal).
It broke the habit. Writing helped me pray again. Or rather, God used writing to help me pray again.
And I realized, we need to do whatever it takes to help our relationship with God grow and flourish. We need to do whatever it takes to strengthen our faith. Because that’s what matters. Your relationship with God is what matters. Not what other people think or say.
You don’t need to pray like other people pray. You’re not a morning person? Then pray at night! Do you think God is going to pay less attention to your prayers because you don’t pray at 5 o’clock in the morning? Do you think He deducts points off of your Christianity because the first thing you do when you wake up is grab a cup of coffee? Friend, it’s morning somewhere in the world anyway!
All God wants is you. Anytime of the day or night, in whichever way you can best come to Him. (Click to tweet!)
Linking up with Monday’s Musings.
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