Theme of the Month - Prayer

I hope to address a theme every month or so.  Since I am starting this one late I will take it through September and hopefully start the next theme in October.  This one deserves more of a focus anyway.

Do you ever have times in your life when it seems like God is really trying to teach you a very specific lesson?  Little messages seem to come at you from all directions and they all seem to say the same thing.  A friend of mine calls this God's Baseball Bat.  He will just keep hitting us in the head with it until we get the idea through our thick skulls.

Lately, it seems like my lesson is prayer.  I tend to shoot up plenty of little arrow prayers through the day, "Help me, God," "Ooh, thank you for that one Jesus!" "Please send a police car after that horrible driver," and other things like that.

But recently, in reading "Grace Cafe" I hit a quote from the catechism that stated "We cannot pray at all times if we do not pray at specific times, consciously willing it."  (And yes, it meant so much to me that this is the second time I have mentioned it during the short life of this blog.)

Then in last week's homily, our priest added something that hit home as well, "What do you call a priest without a prayer life? A bitter, underpaid social worker who can't get married."  And it struck me that as a mother, I have an awful lot in common with a priest.  My work is demanding, rewarding, and definitely never-ending.  And yet I often find myself attempting to accomplish it without much of a real prayer life.  I may be married, but sometimes bitter and underpaid hit the nail right on the head.  And who wants to be either one of those?

My husband and I were talking the other day and realized that we would be absolute fools to try to get through our lives with this many kids without leaning on God and being in communication with Him always.  Yet we try to do it anyway.  Would we attempt to live without ever eating if we had a nutritionist cooking us the freshest organic food anytime we hungered?  Of course not!  But we deny ourselves the fuel to live our lives all the time.