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This is the only way to grow in your faith life.

god-help-me-how-grow-in-prayer-jim-beckman-paperback-cover-art“I AM THE WORST AT PRAYING.”

I typed the confession to a friend, mildly hyperbolic and wholly rooted in frustration with my apparent commitment to distraction, while I half-watched the Olympics on a giant flat-screen.

I do not need to watch the men’s slalom more than I need to sit with Jesus, but I picked it (and even for a distraction, showed up with divided attention).

Then I thought of God, Help Me: How to Grow in Prayer — the book my friend and fellow blogger Edmund Mitchell recommended.

Then grad school got hard until graduation. Then I wrote a book. Then I wanted to hibernate.

But I stood. I stepped away from the slalom. I searched my room for the book. I found it, buried beneath others, and finished it over the weekend. The book, by Jim Beckman, who works as faculty at the Augustine Institute, is simultaneously a swift kick in the pants and an empathetic hug for whoever is “the worst at praying.”

Below you’ll find my favorite excerpts. Hope they kick you in the pants and hug you, too:

  • “There is very little in prayer that depends on me. … The only things that I bring to the mix are consistently showing up for prayer and the disposition of my heart when I am there. With so little to contribute, I have decided that I want to make sure I’m doing my part every day.” -p. 13
  • “The way we spend our time tends to reveal what we place value on. One author I read on this topic observed with amusement that no one ever died of hunger because of not having time to eat. There are things we do with our time every day, and if we track our activity, we’ll see what is truly important to us. If prayer is something we place value on, we’ll make time for it.” -p. 14
  • “…desolation is one of the main stumbling blocks for many (young adults). The minute someone experiences some distance from God, it becomes a reason to stop praying and to give up spiritual disciplines. Yet the very purpose of the desolation is to strengthen your resolve, not for you to give up! So hold fast!” -p. 44
  • “…This is classic desolation. It is evident even in some of the wording of her emotions: never, always, no one, the only person. This is the voice of the enemy: He tends to speak in absolutes like this.” -p. 52
  • “If you desire to grow in your faith life, you must make a commitment to consistently spend time in prayer. There is no other way.” -p. 58
  • “Little things done consistently become a formidable force in our lives. The issue is which direction these habits are moving us.” -p. 96
  • “Our supernatural habits may deeply desire time with God in prayer, while our natural habits would desire more time in bed! ‘Grace has to operate through our faculties; we have to work for the destruction of habits that make our faculties bad instruments and for the development of habits that will make the good instruments — to the point where the supernature has become as sort of second nature.’ … Get out of bed to pray more time than you decide to sleep, and eventually a new habit will be formed. But get some resolve about you. This way of living isn’t easy, nor should it be.” -p. 112.

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Click here to learn more about God Help Me.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. So, if you click the links and purchase the products I recommend, I earn a little commission at no extra cost to you. And when you do, I am sincerely grateful.

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3 Lessons and 2 Tips from Dan Brennan.

3 Lessons and 2 Tips is a series of interviews in which some of my favorite people (and probably some of yours) share three lessons they’ve learned by being married, plus two tips for single people.

This edition features Dan Brennan, a blogger and author of Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women. Grateful he took the time to share three lessons he learned in marriage and two tips for single people:

AS: How did you meet your wife?

 DB:  I went to visit a friend who had begun her freshman year in a college three hundred miles from home. She introduced me to her friend, Sheila, who was a Christian teaching mathematics at the college. We met on Saturday, February 21, 1981. I was a taxi driver at the time with three college credits to my name. Sheila was on the verge of getting her doctorate. We were married on October 17, 1981.

AS: What’s the first lesson you’ve learned in marriage?

DB: Learn to cherish the beauty in your spouse and your marriage. Don’t get distracted by how-to manuals or roles but learn to cherish the presence of God revealing himself through the beauty of your spouse and your marriage. Learn to see where beauty dwells in your relationship and in your spouse. What keeps a marriage flourishing is learning to nurture a deep attraction in your spouse beyond the romantic intensity stage. Embracing beauty in your spouse and marriage through the years after you been together means you will enjoy the deep pleasure of each other’s presence years after the romantic intensity has faded.

AS: And a second lesson?

DB: Learn to cherish the friendship of marriage. We all know about the challenge of romantic passion diminishing. Nurturing an ongoing friendship with your spouse is not the same thing as trying to keep the romantic passion alive. Learn to cherish your spouse as your friend and you’ll go through seasons of passion and seasons of solid togetherness. Cherishing your spouse as a friend means you learn to delight in the other as you share life together. It is a seasoned orientation of tenderness, affection, and reverence toward our spouse as a friend. Seeing our spouses as our friend means we will learn to cherish someone who is similar to us and different from us.

AS: And a third lesson?

DB: Learn to tolerate misattunements through change and difference. Starry-eyed newlyweds tend to believe they know each other enough to stay married forever. But all encounter change, growth, and difference as they journey together as a marital couple. There are going to be misattunements where we long for communion with our spouse on a specific issue (political, spiritual, and so on) that means much to us and our spouse will not be able to meet us there. Cherishing beauty and friendship will go a long way in helping us tolerate the misattunements we are going to encounter.

AS: What’s one tip for readers who are single?

DB: Learn to savor and cherish beauty in your present life. Learn to receive God’s beauty and delight in you through the sacraments, friendships, family, community, and vocation. Deep beauty (which is found in God’s presence) is not something you have to wait to experience.

AS: And a second tip?

DB: Learn to cherish your friends now. It’s a virtue that teaches you how to relish and treasure people who are similar to you and different from you. Do not buy into the line that cherishing is for romantic couples only. Cherish your friends. You will discover that cherishing is something you can experience before marriage and within marriage.

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Connect with Dan: Click here to visit his blog.

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Not all men are bullets.

A phone call is jarring when in it, your friend divulges the discovery she made of her husband’s infidelity. Of her boyfriend’s big lie. Of her crush’s double life. Or of his wife.
Whatever the breach of trust, the result — at first, at least — is devastating. One person’s choice pulls the path out from under somebody else, somebody who didn’t sign up for this. Somebody who promised to be true to him even in bad times after he promised infidelity would never be the source of them.Until it was.

“Until death,” as it turns out, is often code for “until I change my mind” — fidelity often only upheld when not inconvenient. She picks him as husband and intertwines her world with his, but has to peg him, when he leaves her, as a bullet.

You really dodged a bullet.

Fidelity is too often breached, too treated as impossible. I’ve received too many jarring phone calls.This isn’t a blame game. Relationships are systemic, and most marriages that end probably shouldn’t have started. But I’ve met enough women who are so disheartened by the men who used to walk life beside them to share this with all men on women’s behalf:

 
Some of us are giving up on you.Which doesn’t mean good single men will be single forever. It means women need good single men now more than ever.

We need you to step up and stand out.

To teach your brothers (biological or otherwise) how to make good choices.

To teach them to treat women first as sisters.

We need our male friends and our brothers and our dads to do what they say they are going to do. We need to meet men who use forethought before they pursue us, who pursue God before they pursue us. We need men whose choices inspire us to say “they do exist” (and not “is this some kind of a joke?”).

We need to know that men exist who want to love a woman like Christ loves the church. Who know love is a choice.

We need to know that not all men are bullets.

Because I know you aren’t, but I know a lot of ladies who need good men to prove it.

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[Repost] Thoughts on not getting what you want.

Have you ever felt like what you did or said changed your course so completely that you ruined your chances of achieving something?

That a decision you made created conditions that made it impossible for you to get what you want?

That a part of you had so turned somebody off — be it an acquaintance, a potential employer, a guy or a girl — that had you only spoken or behaved differently, the rupture that rendered your relationship over forever never would have existed.

That thanks to you, you lost what you should’ve, would’ve, could’ve had.

As if we have that kind of control.

The truth is we are in control of what we say and do. And sometimes, that thing we say or do does, in fact, change your course so completely that what you thought you had coming never comes. And sometimes, that decision you make does create conditions that aren’t favorable for getting what you want.

But an important and often neglected part of this truth is that because my course or conditions change or somebody walks away because of me does not mean I didn’t get what I should’ve gotten. It means I didn’t get what wasn’t meant to be — that I didn’t get what wasn’t designed for me.

And if it wasn’t for me, why would I even want it?

Once, Job said this to God (Job 42:2): “I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.”

…amen.

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A version of this post originally appeared in 2011.

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[Announcement] THE TITLE OF MY BOOK.

I HAVE BEEN HARBORING ANOTHER SECRET.

This one for more than a month.

And I just can’t harbor it any longer.

My book has a title.

 So this fall, when you find it on shelves or online, you’ll know it’s mine when this is what it’s called:

[insert drum roll]
Chastity Is for Lovers
Single, Happy, and (Still) a Virgin

I could not be happier with it.
I also couldn’t be more grateful for your prayers and support.
Stay tuned for a cover reveal. Coming soon…!