(Photo Credit Holly Gustafson)
By Holly Gustafson
As a mom of five kids, I’ve always found summer a tricky time to maintain a consistent prayer life. During the school year, it seems easier to schedule my day; in general, I can predict when I’ll have moments to myself to enter into prayer (although this past year of lockdowns, quarantines, online and hybrid schooling made this complicated!) and I can plan accordingly. But in the summer, when our schedule is looser and our days are little less organized, my prayer routine seems to slip away, and I can find myself at the end of August suddenly feeling really disconnected from any type of coherent spiritual life.
Knowing this, before summer begins, I try to make a simple plan that will keep me and my family engaged in our faith and a life of prayer, even if that looks quite different than it does during the more structured school year. This summer, I plan to spend lots of time with my prayer journal, which has, over the past year and a half of pandemic life, brought focus, constancy, and consolation to my prayer. There is something about the act of writing, of placing my prayer in a real and visible way on the page, that grounds me when I’m feeling untethered and renews me when I’m feeling a bit lukewarm.
If you want to try prayer journaling as a means to restore or maintain a consistent spiritual life throughout the summer, it’s easy to get started. Get a journal or notebook and commit to spending time with it for a few minutes every day, or at least as often as you can. Here are three ways to begin:
1. Journal the Gospel.
If you’re brand-new to prayer journaling, start by reading the daily Gospel passage. Jot down the sentence, phrase, or single word that jumped out of you from the reading, and spend a few moments reflecting on what you’ve written. The best thing is, when you read through these recorded words and phrases at the end of the summer, you might spot a recurring idea or theme, a coherent way that God was guiding you throughout the past two months, or is calling you to act in the months to come.
2. Record your prayer intentions.
Set aside a few pages for summer prayer intentions. When you think of something you need to pray for (or just as importantly, when someone asks for your prayers), write it down. At the end of the summer, you can reread all those intentions – some will have been clearly answered in the way you expected, some will have been answered in a way you never would have imagined, and some will be in the process of being answered in God’s perfect timing.
3. Track your habit.
To be able to enter into prayer in a meaningful and fulfilling way is a grace, but we can invite that grace into our lives by building the habit of daily encountering Christ – in the Gospel, in silence, and in praise. Prayer is not just another thing to be check off our day’s to-do list, but I have found that tracking whether or not I’ve taken time to pray intentionally – especially when I’ve fallen out of the habit – helps me to be accountable, and encourages me to be a bit more consistent. You can draw a calendar (or print and paste one) in your journal and check off every day that you’ve prayed. If you do your best to pray daily, by the end of the summer, you will have developed a habit of prayer to carry forward into the rest of the year.
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Holly Gustafson lives with her husband, James, and their five children, in Regina, where they attend Christ the King Parish. Holly received her Masters in Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, and now pursues her love of language through art, writing, public speaking, and unsolicited grammatical advice. The best advice she ever received was from her spiritual friend, St. Faustina, who told her that when in doubt, “Always ask Love. It advises best.” |
