A Peek at My Own Personal Prayers for My Marriage and for Our Kids
A Peek at My Own Personal Prayers for My Marriage and for Our Kids
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed when you try to pray?
I do.
There are so many needs in our own families as well as with our friends, our country, our world. It’s hard to know how to begin. It’s easy to feel like a failure before we even begin to pray.
Several years ago, I realized that I needed a plan that would enable me to be more organized in my prayer life. My husband John had always had a prayer notebook with different prayers for each day. He suggested I might try something like that.
So I did!
I bought a very simple small notebook and some sticky dividers to enable me to create a section for each day of the week. I choose a theme for each day for our immediate family, creating a prayer around this theme.
Mondays I pray about our relationships with the Lord, inserting names into the Lord’s prayer.
Tuesdays I pray for our marriages, Wednesdays for close accountable Christian friendships, Thursdays, for boldness in proclaiming the gospel, Fridays for each of our families to be given a passion for the poor, lonely and hurting and a means in which to care for them.
Each year we ask our five children and their mates to send us very specific prayer requests for each of them and their children for the coming year. We want to know what’s on their hearts for their kids in order to pray more specifically for them. Each family is assigned a day on which I can focus on that family. I glue these notes from the parents into my prayer journal. My notebook has additional pages where I list the names of friends, our church staff, extended family, our country, special needs. I’m always adding things to my notes and checking things off. Spreading this out over a week enables me to be more focused and less overwhelmed.
Today I want to share with my Tuesday prayers for our marriages. (We have 5 married children and then John and me, so I am praying this for the 12 of us)
Dear Father,
You have called all 12 of us into marriage. It was your creation that you might be glorified Lord. Please protect and deepen our unions. Give to each of us:
A sweetness of speech
The desire to work through struggles and stick to it when we are tempted to flee
Good communication
Help us to really listen and consider the other’s view-not presume
Eyes only for each other and a growing enjoyment of each other
A desire to serve the other even when we don’t feel like it
The discipline to quickly forgive and to ask for forgiveness
A sense of how we are fitting together–two being better than one
Eyes to see and recognize how the enemy might try to tear us apart and choose to resist him
A growing thankfulness for one another and your help to express it more often
Discipline and time to pray together
More spontaneous laughter
Deliver us from:
Taking one another for granted
Failing to appreciate or to build up one another
Those who would try to tear apart our marriages
Wandering eyes
Emotional divorce
Please be adding layers of glue to our unions and melting us into oneness
May our marriages glorify you
There is not one perfect way to pray. Yours will be different. John’s prayer notebook is different from mine! He has photos-too much trouble for me☺ What has been helpful to me is to have a simple plan. So, I share this in order to encourage you to develop your own plan that best fits your needs.
If you want to see my prayers for the other days of the week and read more details about my daily prayers, you will find them in the appendix of my book Cousin Camp.
It helps me to remember that it delights our heavenly Father when we call on him!
“Call unto me and I will show you great and mighty things that you do not know.” –Jeremiah 33:3
We have an Advocate, Jesus Christ, sitting at the right hand of God interceding for us and for our kids and grandkids! It’s not all up to us! Whew!
“Therefore, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him because he always lives to intercede for them.” –Hebrews 7:25