"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
The other day, after a rather difficult meeting with a friend I parted with the words “I’ll pray for you”.
It got me to thinking – how many times do I say that and I never actually do it? How many times do I use it as just a farewell, or as code for “Stop talking to me about your problems”?
That’s all I have to say. Please consider that as your thought for the day…
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. Some people struggle with the idea of prayer
(a) It relates to how God hears prayer
“A man put it to me by saying ‘I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.'”
(b) Specifically, how God can hear prayers at the same time
“Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time”
2. Our trouble stems from how we experience life in time
“Our life comes to us moment by moment One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like”
(a) They assume that God experiences things in the same way
We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the Theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now some of the scientists are doing the same.
(b) However, God is not in Time
“His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him”
Have you ever tried to do a novena and failed? Maybe it slipped your mind for a few days, or maybe you did remember, but only at inconvenient moments when you didn’t have the novena text with you? If what I’m describing has happened to you, then I have a suggestion for you: use Google Calendar as your prayer buddy.
When I intend to do a novena, I create a repeating event in Google Calendar to remind me. The wonderful thing about it is that you can synchronize the calendar with your cell phone so you have you’ll see the reminder wherever you are. If you include the text for the novena in the event’s description, you won’t even have to go hunting around to find the prayer for that day. Google Calendar will work with both iPhone or Android devices.
If you’re not sure how to do this in Google Calendar, here are the steps necessary to setup a novena reminder:
1. Create new event
Click at the first day when you’ll be doing the Novena. I’d suggest picking a time when you know you’ll be consistently free over the course of the nine days. Enter the name of the novena and then click the “Edit Event” link:
2. Enter event description
In the “Description” field, enter the text needed for the novena, or include a link to a website which contains the text. Then click on the checkbox next to “Repeat”:
3. Setup Repetition
Clicking on the checkbox next to “Repeat” will cause a new dialog to appear. On this dialog you can setup how this event repeats. Since we’ll be praying a Novena, set it to “Daily” repetition and to end after nine occurrences. Once this is completed, click “Done”:
4. Jesus saves… and so should you
Everything is now correctly setup, so click “Save” and you should see the sequence of reminders created.
Hope this helps. Happy praying!
I can always tell when someone has shared one of my articles on social media as I see a sudden spike in the server activity as one of my posts reaches a new audience.
With that in mind, I have a request. I’d really like to expand the reach of this blog and you can help make this a reality. Could you share one of my posts with your friends today? Whether you use Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or whatever kids use these days, could you post a link to just one of my articles?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk entitled “Hidden Treasure: How the Old Testament is unveiled in the New”. In this presentation, I explain how Biblical Typology helps us to see Christ throughout Salvation History.
Hidden Treasure: How the Old Testament is unveiled in the New (Download)
I have a confession.
At the beginning of the year I announced that one of my New Year Resolutions was to read the Bible from cover-to-cover in a year. It was all going so well… I had managed to get through the hard bits: the genealogies of Genesis, the battles of Exodus and even the liturgical rubrics of Leviticus. In fact, at the halfway point of this year I was even a little ahead of schedule in my daily reading.
Ah, but then things went awry… I had a couple of tough, busy weeks and it all went to pot. I got out of the habit of reading my Bible each day. The habit was broken and before I knew it, two months had passed and I hadn’t done any of my set reading.
As of yesterday, I was miles behind on my assigned schedule and hadn’t done any devotional reading in ages. Today that changed. Today I set aside some time. I read my Bible for about half an hour. It was long overdue. It was a small beginning, but at least it was a start.
This struggle to re-establish the habit of daily Scripture reading got me to thinking about a similar struggle in the Spiritual life…
Times of failure are so hard. It’s always tempting to think “Well, I’ve screwed this up. There’s no point trying again”. If you’re working towards a goal, failures and setbacks can be so demoralizing. There is the temptation to give up, particularly when the final goal seems so far off.
If you’ve ever tried dieting and ended up binging one evening, you’ll know the temptation just to throw in the towel. Starting again just seems too hard and helpless. I’ve heard people express something similar in reference to Confession, choosing to forgo Confession entirely rather than repeatedly confessing some habitual sin.
New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, Once Upon A Wardrobe, which will be released on October 19th.