Why can’t I pray like she does?
How many times have I jealously thought this to myself? I have wondered why others appear to have closer relationships with God.
She can have long conversations with the Lord!
She can recite so many prayers from memory!
She sticks to each novena she starts!
Pure jealousy. I sit there, head bowed, but looking around to see what others are doing. I compare my prayer life to that of my sister. I envy her closeness with the Lord and how she seems to have the Holy Spirit touch her every word and action.
But isn’t that exactly what I’ve been warned against? I reject the Word of God and His overwhelming love and adoration of me for a comparison game. No, I don’t pray like she does.
But that’s okay. It’s good. And it’s how God designed it. Instead of being jealous as the Jews were in the First Reading, we are glad that we each have our own relationship with God.
I do have my own, wholly unique relationship with the Lord. I pray in my own way. Sometimes I pray a rosary, sometimes I recite memorized prayers, sometimes I journal, sometimes I sit in silence in Adoration, sometimes I meet Him in Scripture, and sometimes I shake my fists in the air and in exasperation say, “What do you even want from me, God!?”
My prayer life changes with the seasons of my life. It evolves, it ebbs and flows, sometimes being fruitful and transformative, and sometimes being pushed aside altogether. I feel the most connected with Him when I’m on my knees, arms outstretched, and singing in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
He loves me and meets me where I am.
I pray in my own way. Click To TweetWatch this brief clip of Saint Teresa of Calcutta about the gift of God’s love.
Dr. Samantha Aguinaldo-Wetterholm is a wife to Paul, mom to three little ones, and practices dentistry at a public health community center for low income families in the Bay Area, California. She (unashamedly) thinks ice cream is its own food group, loves anything Harry Potter, does not leave the house without wearing sparkly earrings, and is an enthusiastic proponent of the Oxford comma. Find out more about her here.
Thank you for sharing this. I often feel the same way! Like why isn’t my faith or relationship with God strong enough to say the rosary every day or get past the first day of a novena. But then I sit and journal – writing letters to God or finally enter that quiet church. And all of that fades away.
This is well written, and true- but I want to stress that praying the Rosary daily is so very, very important. I think if people did it faithfully each day, our world would change. WE would change. It is the prayer that Our Lady continually urges us to pray daily. We should strive to please her in this way, just fifteen minutes a day.
“The greatest method of praying is to pray the Rosary.”
Saint Francis de Sales
“The Most Holy Virgin in these last times in which we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families… that cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.” – Sister Lucia