Whining prayer is…

…okay with God. Hey, it must be!   King David did it: “How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day?” (Ps 13:2,3).   St. Faustina did it: “Jesus, Jesus, I cannot go on any longer” (Diary 129).   David and Faustina, both steadfast lovers of God, let fly their frustration. They didn’t pretend to be stronger than they were. They didn’t paste a fake smile on their face because they were scared God would get mad.  They let Him have it with both barrels – pretty much complaining that He should have helped them yesterday, and what’s the hold-up?  But God’s a big boy – he’s fine with that.    God answered them Then God comes in with an attitude adjustment for David, whom He inspires to say: “I trust in your faithfulness.” Even facing imminent death, David’s faith and hope rise to the surface in his mind and heart. He remembers all the other times God saved him and knows this won’t be different. God does the same for Faustina. She writes: “Suddenly I heard a voice within my soul. ‘Do not fear; I am with you.’ And an unusual light illumined my mind, and I understood that I should not give in to such sorrows. I was filled with a certain strength and left my cell with new courage to suffer.” Interesting that God didn’t make the pain go away. He gave them both greater strength to suffer.   Now for the rest of us I can relate. I sounded like Complaining David during the 18 months it took to fire an employee (I was working in the federal government) who spent all his creativity figuring out how to avoid actually doing any work. In this situation, the supervisor can’t make even one wrong move – not a glance, not a word, not an email – or the employee can challenge the firing. Which would drag it out even longer. The guy did sue me, but that was quickly dropped.  As the excruciating process dragged on, I was surprised to find myself no longer able to feel happy in the job I loved, or even at home. What kept me going was justice – for my other great staff and for the American taxpayers. My prayer was, “I know you’re toughening me up for something, but I hate this. You’ve vaporized my happiness. This totally stinks, God, and you know it – and you’re doing it anyway. What gives?” …my up-to-date version of David’s Psalm 13.   God’s answer Like David and Faustina, I continued to suffer. And like them, my hope and trust in God grew with the difficulty. To be honest, for me it boiled down to: Who else am I gonna turn to? You have the words of eternal life. David’s and Faustina’s complaints to God yielded the strength to raise their eyes above the passing pain to the eternal joy awaiting them.  Their example gives us the courage to do the same. Even if some of us need to start off with a little whining.

Could you use a little inspiration to keep your inner fire for prayer burning bright? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes, because without seeking inspiration, prayer can become rote, routine, and let’s face it – tedious. But it never has to be that way!   Psssst!  If you’d love to belong in a community of like-minded Catholics who are growing together in building a prayer life that feels joyful and natural, let’s chat: https://calendly.com/vir2connection/chat-with-roseNow for the inspiration. The three truths below have meant a lot to me when I’ve started to doubt myself, drift into a prayer rut, or even doubt whether God is taking my fervent requests seriously. 😂  I pray it gives you a lift, too!   Truth #1 Consistency counts. “No matter what my condition may be, if I am only willing to pray and become faithful to grace, Jesus offers me every means of returning to an inner life that will restore to me my intimacy with Him, and will enable me to develop His life in myself.  “And then, as this life gains ground within me, my soul will not cease to possess joy, even in the thick of trials.”  —The Soul of the Apostolate by Jean-Baptiste Chautard, page 20. Notice how Fr. Chautard doesn’t say how we’re supposed to feel in prayer—our willingness to stick with it and be open to grace is enough.   Truth #2 You never need to get stuck.  Here are three things to try when prayer “isn’t working.” Shift your attention from your mind to your heart. You don’t need words here. Feel your desire to connect with God, and feel his response to your desire. Always keep something nearby that you know will get you into the God-zone. For example, a book (I suggest Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Jacques Philippe), music, scripture, or an image. Make an act of faith, out loud if you can. An example would be: “God, I know you are more present to me right now than I am to myself. I believe that you are working powerfully in me and through me, even if I can’t feel much right now. I love you. Thank you for loving me more than I will ever know.”   Truth #3 You never have to pray alone.Scripture says that the Holy Spirit prays for us when we know not how to pray. And then, there’s our Guardian Angel who brings God’s inspiration to pray and watches over us always. Do you think he prays with us? I often ask saints to pray with me for certain intentions. For example, St. John Vianney joins me in praying for parish priests. Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, our country’s patroness, prays with me for the health of our nation.  Asking a saint to join you in prayer can make you feel like your prayer is powerful, even if you don’t feel that way at the moment!

If this weren’t a Sunday, it would be the feast of St. Faustina, one of my favorite saints. I used to meditate on her diary in the chapel during and after my conversion. During the toughest times since, she’s my go-to saint who makes me feel better just knowing that she kept the faith when things looked bleak.    Why we love her Faustina was anxious a lot. She was rejected by the sisters she lived with. She was often in pain. The mission Jesus himself gave her seemed to be failing. Sound familiar? And yet she had a secret weapon that gave her unshakable trust. I call this secret weapon “wasting time with God.” She wrote: “I will not allow myself to be so absorbed in the whirlwind of work as to forget about God. I will spend all my free moments at the feet of the master hidden in the Blessed Sacrament.”   How Faustina helps us She keeps it simple: simply show up.  We don’t have to feel anything in prayer.  We don’t have to pretend everything’s great in our lives.  We don’t have to carve out hours for prayer—Faustina speaks of grabbing “moments.” And because, like Faustina, the whirlwind of work draws us into its vortex, prayer can feel like we’re wasting time. But that’s a lie of the enemy, whose only goal is to separate us from God.   Practice for heaven Here’s the truth: connection with God is what we were created for, and it’s how we will spend our heaven. Hanging out with God brings us a deep peace that the world cannot give, or take away.  The peace we receive in prayer empowers us to see everything through God-colored glasses. We’re more patient, kind, and forgiving. Prayer is a way of practicing for heaven now!   How to do it My #1 tip for claiming time to pray every day is to choose a consistent time and place when you’ll have the least chance of interruption.  Most people find first thing in the morning is best. For you, maybe it’s during your lunch hour. One woman prays while she’s breastfeeding.  Ask God for help deciding, and be creative! For example, consider getting buy-in from family members to support you in this. One mother of many children warns them, “You don’t want to see mommy without her prayer time.” 😂 If you block out the time, I guarantee it will seem easy after it becomes a habit. Start with a small amount of time that is 100% doable and work up from there. Even on days that your to-do list screams for attention, the difference you’ll experience in your outlook and relationships will keep you placing “wasting time with God” at the top of that list.   Could you use some encouragement? Well, I have great news. My 31-day prayer journal, “Bless You Daughter: Praying with Resilient Women of the Bible” is FREE for you today. But it won’t be free for long! Grab it here now.You’ll get: - a fresh take on 31 relatable women in scripture- questions that prompt you to ponder how the scripture applies to your life today- space to write your ponderings and prayers- a short prayer to set your day off to a great start Get this valuable journal while it’s still free! 

This week, I drifted from the peace of God into feelings of not being enough. I fell into the comparison trap, feeling small and inadequate. Everyone seemed more successful, more effective than me. My stomach felt tense and sad. I knew this wasn’t from God – and that I was buying a lie of the enemy.Then, while I was pondering my favorite psalm, Psalm 95, God brought me out of fear and self-doubt and back into trust. I pray that my meditation on this psalm helps you also get from anxiety to trust – from dwelling on the future or the past into the beautiful present moment of God’s eternal love.   Meditation on Psalm 95    Come let us worship the Lord   Let us not worship anyone or anything else.   and shout with joy   Find the joy in everything we are and everything we do. It’s there if we look for it!   to the rock   The unchanging, eternal God is always there for us.   who saves us   Saves us from what? From sin and the consequences of sin – eternal death in hell. That is the ultimate good news! The cause of our joy.   Let us enter with praise and thanksgiving   Enter what?    Enter this day – this situation. Enter this moment.    Let us enter every thought, word, and task with an attitude of praising God and thanking him for this person we’re seeing right now, this situation we’re living right now.   If we enter this moment with praise and thanksgiving, we will have the right attitude to interpret everything that God is allowing to happen – because we’ll remember that everything comes from him – to do us good – to save us from sin and death.   and sing joyful songs to the Lord.   This reminds us to keep joy top-of-mind at every moment, even in painful times. Why? Because pain is passing away. Joy is eternal, and it’s available to us now, if we’re open to it.    Joy and gratitude are foretastes of heaven. Self-pity, fear, blame, and complaining are foretastes of hell. Will we choose heaven or hell at this moment?   The Lord is God   The psalmist couldn’t put it more plainly. This statement encapsulates the entirety of this psalm, and the entirety of scripture. It is the entire reason for our joy and our reason to trust him.   the mighty God   Yes, we might have other gods like food, comfort, or doomscrolling – but they have no power outside of Almighty God.   The great king over all the gods.   The Almighty King, the one God, is love.   He holds in his hands the depths of the earth and the highest mountains as well. He made the sea. It belongs to him. The dry land, too, for it was formed by his hands.   The psalmist handles eternal things in the first part of the psalm – that we worship the Lord in every moment and praise him with joy because he is love, because he is eternal, because he is greater than the lesser gods we bring into our lives.   The psalmist then asks us to look at the earth – what we see around us.    We can’t see God, but we can look the mountains, the ocean, and sea. Each blade of grass is the work of his hands. Everything is meant to remind us of his power and his personal care for us.   Let us bow down and worship, bending the knee before the Lord our maker. For he is our God and we are his people, the flock he shepherds.   He alone is the one to whom we look to receive everything good. And we are his people, the flock he is shepherding toward heaven.   And we don’t go through life alone – our fellow believers are members of God’s flock, his family. He protects us, guides us, holding us close. And he empowers us to be an example for others.   If today you hear his voice,    Some translations say when today you hear his voice. God is always speaking to us in our hearts, in our worship, in nature, and in our relations with other people. He speaks to us constantly of his power to save.   harden not your hearts   Our hearts can grow hard when we fail to trust God by slipping into regret of the past and worry about the future. When we “play God” by holding other people in judgment.   This hardness of heart comes from one thing: not keeping up our intimacy with God in prayer.    as they did in the wilderness,   Every life has promised-land times and desert-times. Like the Israelites, when we are in a desert time, we can feel alone, helpless, confused, and doubt ourselves. We can be tempted to doubt God, too, as they did when complained to Moses, “Were there no burial places in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness?” (Exodus 14:11).   when at Meribah and Massah, they challenged me and provoked me, although they had seen all of my works.   They provoked God by forgetting his past blessings and his promise. It’s the same for us. The main temptation in a desert-time is thinking that the desert is never going to end. And that there is no promised land after all.   Instead, the virtue of Hope overcomes that temptation. Hope reminds us of God’s promise that he is guiding us to heaven, even when we’re in pain.   One way to overcome the temptation to blame God for our pain is to remember times when God has blessed us. Remember the times when we got unexpected and undeserved gifts. Call to mind the times when we were in pain of mind or body and God brought good out of it.   Forty years I endured that generation –   St. Peter tells us that the Lord endured the rebellious Israelites, as he endures us, to give us time to turn our hearts back to him: “Consider the patience of our Lord as salvation” (2 Peter 3:15).    I said they are a people whose hearts go astray   “Going astray” means we are loving and worshiping something above God.    We worship our own plans – feeling devastated when things don’t turn out as we expect. We worship other people, feeling crushed when we don’t get the praise or recognition we think they owe us.    We become anxious and frustrated when we rely on ourselves alone to decide what to do next and how it should turn out – forgetting to ask God’s help.   The beginning of the psalm tells us that to avoid our hearts going astray, we need to make a decision to enter every moment with praise and thanksgiving. Because even when our plans go astray, our hearts can remain in God.    When we are on track with God, we believe that he is giving us exactly what we need for our salvation, no matter what it feels like at the moment.   And the only way to bring our hearts back on track is to pray. To reach out and make that connection with God, who is always reaching out to us.   and they do not know my ways,   God’s way is first of all love. God showed Martha his way when she complained that she was working too hard. Jesus reminded her that if she kept the eyes of her heart on him as she was working, she would find peace. Martha had given up God to worship her to-do list – and her heart went astray. Even though Jesus was right in the room! she lost connection with his peace.   so I swore in my anger, they shall not enter into my rest.   We can substitute the word “sorrow” for “anger.” Was Jesus angry when he asked, “How many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Matthew 23:37)?    Jesus is sorrowful that we would even for a moment choose anxiety over his peace. That we would choose a foretaste of hell by worrying instead of a foretaste of heaven by trusting.    Instead, we can choose in this moment to connect our awareness with praise and thanksgiving, and see pain as fleeting and temporary. We can choose to focus on the eternal rest God offers us even now, in this moment. He offers us at each moment the peace of following his way.   The last word We heard from St. Peter earlier. He goes on to say, “Beloved, since you are forewarned, be on your guard not to be led into the error of the unprincipled and to fall from your own stability. But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Peter 3:17-18).    Are you floundering in your prayer life? Do you find yourself: Inconsistent in prayer? Distracted? Not sure if you’re doing it right? Schedule a free, no-obligation Clarity Call with me and we’ll look and see if and how I can help you gain the trust and peace in your life that God intends.

How do the great saints keep their inner peace? What do they do when they feel themselves start to get angry, stressed, or impatient? We heard from St. Jane de Chantal last week, now it’s the turn of another Frenchwoman.This 60-sec video is the first in a series to help you find that out. Saint of the Week: Therese of Lisieux If you’d like to be more like St. Therese to avoid anxiety and impatience, let’s chat. In helping over 10,000 Catholics get closer to God, I’ve learned that inner peace is available to everyone -- if you know the 5 simple steps to let Christ’s peace in!   Book a free Clarity Call with me at TalkWithRose.net -- to see if and how I can help you have the intimate connection with God that gives you the peace the world cannot take away. ….Here’s how St. Therese did it!   

Before we get to St. Francis de Sales, do you want to hear how YOU can overcome anxiety?If you’re a “Yes,” join me in my free 1-hour workshop, “Banish Anxiety: 5 Simple Steps to Lasting Peace and Purpose.” Register here now! You’ll discover the exact steps I and my clients use to reclaim our peace when we’re tempted by worry, impatience, self-doubt – or any trigger of anxiety. Like last week when I showed up at a meeting and felt like I totally said the wrong thing – but didn’t beat myself up later for it! You won’t believe how well this 5-step system works. Sign up for the “Banish Anxiety” workshop. OK – time for a 2-minute video where we learn St. Francis de Sales’ #1 cause of anxiety…and how we can avoid it!     Wondering how to think about ourselves less and think about God more? Join me in the “Banish Anxiety” free 1-hour workshop! Register here.

Do you ever feel like you're floundering in prayer? Is your mind in 49 places at once when you sit down to pray? Do you wonder if He's even listening? Help is on the way! My 3-min video below gives you three things you can do when it feels like prayer isn’t working. BUT FIRST – you’re invited to my FREE 60-min workshop, “Banish Anxiety: 5 Simple Steps to Lasting Peace and Purpose.” Register here now for TONS more ways to revive your Catholic prayer life and make the connection with God you’ve always wanted.   3 things to do when prayer "isn't working"  

They say God is simple, and we’re the ones who make things complicated. While I was praying Psalm 95 this morning, something very simple occurred to me. The psalm says, “Forty years I endured that generation. I said they are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not know my ways. So I swore in my anger, they shall not enter into my rest.” Here’s the simple thing: If we are restless, we have gone out of the rest we find only in God. And we “go out” in two ways. We love other gods that make our lives complicated and stressful—we worship: Our expectations Our idea of perfection Our to-do list We ruminate about the past and fear the future. We forget that:  We find God in this moment—because God is outside of time. We can’t change the past, but we can choose to forgive others, and ourselves, as God does. The future isn’t here—and it’s God who’s in control of it, not us. God is saying through Psalm 95 that if we know His ways, if we follow the First Commandment to love Him above all other gods—that our souls will be at rest in Him.   What now? So it’s our job in our spiritual life to ask ourselves: What do we love more than God, that’s causing us stress and anxiety?  What has made us forget to take refuge in the loving and protecting love of God?  How have we let ourselves be lured outside the refuge of God’s “now” to fret about the future? How and for what have we let our hearts “go astray”?   What’s the secret? The secret to inner peace is in these two things: Plan as well as we can for the future and leave the rest to God. That includes praying every day that His will be done. Notice when we’re becoming anxious and call our minds back to a quotation or a Bible verse that reminds us that God is our all-in-all—that any pain we’re experiencing is passing away and that God’s love, mercy, protection, and care is our refuge in this moment to find our rest in Him. God gives us that simple way to reclaim this moment in Christ.   It worked for King David King David wrote this 3,000 years ago: “The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction terrified me. The cords of Sheol encircled me; the snares of death lay in wait for me. In my distress I called out: LORD! I cried out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry to him reached his ears.  “He reached down from on high and seized me; drew me out of the deep waters. He rescued me from my mighty enemy, from foes too powerful for me. They attacked me on my day of distress, but the LORD was my support. He set me free in the open; he rescued me because he loves me.” (Psalm 18:5-7;17-20)   Share a favorite verse Scroll down and leave a comment about a favorite quote or Bible verse that helps you remember the love of God.