Intentional Prayer

I've always been bad at intentional prayer... or at least that's how it feels. I would often read scripture and figure out how it applies to my life or I would sorta pray for someone who asked me to pray for them, but I didn't know how or what that meant.. so I just felt uncomfortable.. Then I lived in household with St. Paul's Outreach (read more about it here) and we have morning prayer 4 mornings a week where we would pray intentions, so I became more familiar with it, but it still was uncomfortable.

This year, going into lent I had an increasing desire for the Eucharist, which is why I made my "add" to go to mass or adoration daily, but there has been so much more coming out of that. First of all, most days I end up going to adoration and I was finding myself convicted to pray for girls in my youth group.

Also, about a month ago I started my half marathon training class. I'll be running the Cap City half marathon here in Columbus this May (WOO!). And so I've been training a lot, and I'll start my run with my headphones in, listening to music, but after a while I want some silence, but when I don't have anything going on in my brain I start to focus on how much my body hurts, so I needed something to keep my mind off what I was actually doing.

Now, this is my second half marathon. For my first one, I ran with one of my friends and about half way through I was really struggling and he suggested we pray a rosary and if I had to stop and walk we had to pause where we were in the rosary to help create motivation to run... I've taken this habit up in my training.. A lot of times you hear about people offering miles or someone - so it's like I'm going to run this mile for George that the Lord may ease his suffering with my suffering.. or something along those lines, but I'm really bad at keeping track of where I'm at mileage wise in my runs, so I just go by the decade..

I'll take my headphones out when I get sick of noise and then I start praying the rosary. I offer the opening prayers for someone and then each decade after that I pray for a specific person or a group of people. And if I stop running I have to pause in my rosary.. It's so great - it let's me pray more intentionally for people, it allows me to actually remember to pray for all these people who I say I'll pray for, it keeps me moving in my run and it keeps my mind off how much it hurts in my run.

I just wanted to share this as an encouragement - we're always new ways and more ways to pray, to draw closer to the Lord! How are you drawing closer to the Lord this lent? Do you struggle with intentional prayer, what action are you taking to ease this?

God bless you!