What I learned from my 30-day prayer challenge

This was originally posted on the Sanctuary Collective blog as a response to my first Inspiration and Meditation, “Some thoughts on prayer, and a prayer challenge to you”.

Hello, Sanctuary Collective. So, in February I wrote passionately about my prayer life and my challenge to you to pray every day with me. It was my intention to write back to you the first Monday in March and report back on whether or not I had successfully met my own 30-day prayer challenge. Well, you know what they say about good intentions, right? So, here it is, the middle of May, and I am finally writing again, and this time it’s with a revelation I’ve had about prayer. This is going to sound heretical, but I realized over the course of my practicing that there is such a thing as too much prayer. Yes, I said it. Too. Much. Prayer.

Let me be clear about this, what started happening to me over the course of my month of prayer was that I started praying all the time for and during all kinds of things. Something good happened? Prayer. Something bad happened? Prayer. Joy? Prayer. Anxiety? Prayer. Prayer? Prayer. Phew!  At this same time I was having a lot of anxiety about my new job. I teach 4^th Grade, and every day is a new adventure, to put it mildly. Oftentimes I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about lesson plans, discipline, etc. So naturally, since I was in this intense period of daily prayer, I figured that praying at all those moments was the thing to do. In retrospect, it wasn’t.  Or at least not the kind of praying that I was doing, which involved me saying, either out loud or in my head, lots of words. I would lie in bed, filled with anxiety, asking God to take the anxiety away, praying for the needs of others, giving glory to God, or saying some of my favorite memorized prayers – the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Prayer of St. Francis. Nothing would work. The anxiety would heighten, the doubt would increase. Sounds pretty awful, right? It was. I should have blogged about it.

One night, I decided “To Hell with this! I’m not going to pray, I’m just going to clear my mind and lie here.” I had a moment of guilt about this, but as I intentionally cleared my mind and lay on my bed, the anxiety passed and I fell into a deep, restful sleep. I tried this for a few days in a row. I didn’t pray all these grand prayers before I went to sleep at night or when I awoke in the middle of the night and two things happened. One, I fell right back into a restful sleep when I did awaken, and two, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night! Again, I was still having a little guilt about this, as it seemed to be the opposite of praying and felt a little bit like I was turning away from conscious contact with God, and that I was benefitting from it.

Sometime over that week, I was reminded about a story I was told about Mother Theresa, whose life, works, faith, and doubt inspire me incredibly. According to the story, Mother Theresa was asked what sort of prayers she said daily. She said she didn’t “say” prayers daily. The interviewer asked her what she did when she prayed, and she said, “I listen.” The interviewer, thinking he was going to get a good quote out of her, asked, “Ah, so what does God say to you when you’re listening?” And Mother Theresa replied, “God doesn’t say anything. God listens.”

And so now, when I go to sleep at night, I turn off the radio, I turn off the music, I turn it all off, and I listen. I listen to God. I listen for the still, small voice. I have yet to hear it. Instead, what I hear is God listening.