Linking up with Blessed Is She and #BISsisterhood this morning!
Yesterday I decided to just dive right into doing all of the prayer things I wish I had been doing more consistently: praying the liturgy of the hours, saying the rosary as a family, and writing in my prayer journal.
I have been making a mistake that I feel is very tempting for many people: putting off good things until the timing is perfect.
If I knew that I could not consistently have a family rosary, I put it off to try another day. But "another day" has a habit of never showing up, and that family rosary just never got said.
Yesterday I had the day off from cooking dinner and choir rehearsal. It was practically a vacation.
It left us with an open afternoon on a rainy weekday.
Years ago my mom had sent me the bin of all of the giveaway rosaries my sisters and I have received over the years. There are dozens of plastic, glow in the dark, corded rosaries.
I had the kids each pick a rosary out of the bin, sat on the floor with them, and announced we were going to do a rosary now.
They were pretty amenable to that idea. They looked at blocks, fiddled with the rosaries, and squirmed around while I said the prayers.
After completing the rosary, we hung the rosaries up on the hooks with their stockings and went about our day. But the day was so much better!
It was not that anything went more smoothly really: we got rained out of the park, there was a spaghetti explosion while I was making dinner, and a generalized child meltdown during clean up time.
Yet I felt peace.
It was like having a stress-resistant coating over my whole being. I was aware of less than ideal things happening all around me, but they were not able to get under my skin.
Making the decision to pray with my kids, despite the likelihood of meltdown, gave me the peace to be a better mother yesterday. It is an addictive feeling. I find myself looking forward to doing it again today.
Today is busy. I have a lot to do, and not much time to get it all done. Today I have responsibilities in the afternoon, but I want to try out our little family rosary again. That experience of peace is something I want to invite into our lives over and over again.
It might go badly, but I suspect peace will still come in a door held open a crack.
Love this- it's so true! A little prayer goes a long way, especially with a house full of little ones!
ReplyDeleteI read this last week and had meant to comment. My husband has an online prayer ministry at thetrinitymission.org where he leads a traditional anglican morning and evening prayer service each day, it is recorded so you can listen along or just read along. Anyway when he set out to start doing morning prayer everyday it was still a new practice for us, but now we are hooked. I love that my day is marked by prayer and gradually it has helped me to both be more grateful to God and to move at a slower pace, to rely on Him. The process has been slow but looking back I can totally see the change in myself. I think the rosary is a great idea, those historic tools are there to help us and our little kids engage. For evening prayer, which we do after we finish eating, before we clear the table, we light a candle and have a small icon, it gives our family something to focus on and if my daughter behaves and makes the sign of the cross she gets to blow out the candle which is big time for her. Our short prayer probably takes five minutes (we don't do the whole service but recite a psalm, the lords prayer and have some petitions we go through and then offer our own prayers) and it is so worth it. Anyway all this to say, good work Mama, that's this is the stuff draws our families closer to God, and really what else is more important than that?
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