A chance conversation in January 2020 with a friend was only a brief encounter, however, she planted a thought that left me curiously inspired. My friend was retiring from a full-time job at a financial firm because she felt her next task was too important to split time. “Oh, what’s that?” I asked, assuming she would move, become a caregiver, or turn a hobby into a business. Hesitating a bit, she replied, “I’m called to spend time in my prayer room studying 24 years for my prayer journal.” A prayer room? And 24 years writing a prayer journal? Wow.
I was intrigued – how did she keep up the prayer journal, when did she find the time, why did she start, why create a prayer room? Perhaps my friend Terry wouldn’t mind sharing her epic journaling endeavor and private prayer room, because it sounded like an awesome story. You can decide for yourself…
How a 24-year prayer journal starts
I know many women who have kept various journals off and on, but to keep a prayer journal going consistently for 24 years? That’s most admirable.
Like so many of us, Terry’s journey began as she struggled to do it all – juggle family and finances with job and friends/relationships, commitments and burdens. She felt wounded and out of control – her kids were teenagers, the business was flailing, she was so busy, tired and frustrated that she couldn’t handle everything in her life.
She shared, “I felt so much negative stuff, like I was being pounced on for being unworthy somehow. I didn’t know how to be patient with my kids and still let them be independent. How could I do a good job parenting and still love myself if I’m constantly losing my temper? I felt I needed to be perfect. My constant prayer was to get help, and I think I was looking for spiritual direction too,” Terry recalls.
“The person God put before me had a tremendous prayer life, attended daily Mass, spent time in adoration… and she used a prayer journal. We became fast friends, as she shared God’s movement in her life and prayed with me. Over time, she shared a couple of prayer journal entries with me, and I saw the journal as an avenue to record conversations with God. I wanted that! I wanted to hear God speak to me,” she said.
“But even before I made a decision to start writing things down, I was feeling compelled to have a real relationship with my God. I had been unsuccessful at making positive changes in myself – my emotions, feelings, and actions. I needed God’s help. So I started spending more and more time with people of prayer. I found more friends who put God first in their lives – like I wanted to do – and they were finding success. I recognized they still struggled with life’s bumps and bruises; but the difference was, they were at peace in the midst of life’s hurdles. I wanted that!”
But how do you get there? You start by showing up.
“I noticed that ‘Surrender to God’ became the common theme among people who could hear the Lord speak to them,” Terry continued. “Those who prayed could listen and journey with Jesus. I had no idea how to surrender. After all, I’m a mom and need to be in charge. Now I was being told I needed to let go and let God, that I needed to surrender to my Creator. Thus began my journey to be still and listen and to let go.”
Terry also got to know an adoration group and found herself around others striving to increase their faith and overcome struggles. “They talked to God personally, and many of them kept a prayer journal. So now it seemed like every person I knew was telling me that if I wanted to have a conversation with God I should spend time with Him in order to hear what He wants for me,” she recalled. “And isn’t it so true that in order to build a relationship with anyone, you spend time with them and want to be around them?,” she related.
“So I started to do that and simply asked, ‘Lord, I want to know that you talk to me. I don’t hear you and I want to hear you.’ Now…I was a living example of needing to slow down and sort out my thoughts. I really had to work hard at being still and listening, because I was so, so distracted.”
If you just can’t clear your mind and focus, trying to up your prayer game can seem like a losing battle.
God uses the little things
“Then I considered what being ‘completely still’ would really be for me,” Terry acknowledged. “First, I had to clear my mind of all the clutter and I had to consider what that might look like. I felt it would be like the darkest sky with twinkling stars.” So one day she went outside after dusk, sat in the shadows of the deck and let the evening stillness take over.
“Spontaneously I prayed, ‘Lord make my mind as clear as the dark sky until I can finally hear Your voice.’ I practiced this way for five minutes at a time, which eventually stretched to 10 minutes…and then longer, until I could be still and de-clutter my mind to give God a blank slate,” she said. “You usually practice anything you want to be good at, right?”
Then Terry’s journey toward conversing with God took a more intimate turn during a solitary walk on a family vacation in 1996. She found herself extraordinarily moved by the natural beauty along the trail…and “I’m thanking God for each thing – thanksgiving and praise just bubbled out of me. I talked to God and asked for help to hear Him more clearly. I’m enjoying this day because of You, God….and I looked overhead at the clear blue sky and thought, ‘this is like the evenings I spent praying on my deck, clearing my mind, preparing to hear God speak to me.’ And, a scripture verse popped into my thoughts – Psalm 9:1-15. ‘Oh my gosh, did God just put that in my head?’ Wow.”
You don’t have to be special to hear God’s voice
Because she had never really read the Bible much before, Terry had no idea what this “Psalm 9:1-15” would say and had to wait to return from vacation in order to find a Bible to look it up! She wanted to make sure she would remember the verse, so she searched her suitcase for a small notebook a friend had given her to record her vacation fun and wrote down “Psalm 9:1-15” to read later.
“My Psalm 9 experience was such an eye-opening moment for me,” Terry related. “As I read that Scripture, I knew God was speaking straight to my heart through every word. He was speaking directly to me, and I knew it was Him speaking. When I shared it with several friends who understood what I experienced, they replied, ‘Yes, that’s the gift of the Holy Spirit!’
“In all my excitement, I asked the Lord to ‘speak to me again, I want more.’ And soon, He gave me 1 Corinthians 12. Now…I know He was talking to me twice because I didn’t study the Bible and wasn’t familiar with that verse either,” she recalls. “And when I looked it up in a Catholic Bible, 1 Corinthians 12 was titled ‘Spiritual Gifts.’ This was another WOW (With-Out-Words) experience, very powerful for me. Of course, I kept praying and listening. I wanted to be drawn in, to learn more…to know what God wanted of me.”
A prayer journal? Picture a conversation with God
This is where Terry’s prayer journal habit took hold. “It was that day, that profound experience with God, that inspired me to start journaling my spiritual growth. I just knew I had to write these ‘God-moments’ down. As my relationship with the Lord grew, my journal entries became conversations with God,” she said.
“Growing that relationship with God was a challenge for me at times. When you’re not disciplined in prayer – and I wasn’t as a busy wife, mother, and business owner – I would find a few quiet minutes and just show up, leaving everything at the door. I would write a little, sort of a short love note. Eventually, I was able to bring my thoughts more into focus and slow down enough. When you let your mind wander, it’s too much stuff. I thought of my journaling more as a conversation, an ‘in-the-moment’ thing for me.
“After a while, I could sense the movement of God in our time together. Sometimes God was asking me to just rest in His presence and be filled with Him. Other times I was moved to write in my journal. No two times were alike, and it was key for me to just be open to where the Holy Spirit was leading. One thing remained consistent, I could hear God urge me to be still and listen to Him,” she added.
If you don’t have a routine prayer life but want to…
As Terry thought about those first prayer journal entries, she remembered how much she wrote and where she found the solitude. Over the 24 years, she never felt she wanted to stop writing but she didn’t necessarily write every day. “In the early years, I had a lot to say, a lot to process, and a lot to change. I would often go to our local adoration chapel and write, because I liked the silence and could focus more easily.
“But I know some don’t have that luxury – like my friend who puts a chair in the bathroom and locks the door or another who sits in the shower to read her Bible. Everyone has to find her own place without distractions. And, a busy mom might only get 10 minutes of solitude at any time.”
Terry considers herself lucky to have created a prayer room in her home, although it was not an intentional mission.
What about her prayer room?
Well now, how does a prayer room in her Iowa home happen if it wasn’t Terry’s intent? It began with a priest’s gift years before, when she lived in a small Wisconsin community. She cantored for Mass and sang for funerals and a few weddings. As a token of appreciation for her service, the priest gave Terry a small kneeler that she loved. But she soon realized a move was coming. Not knowing what to do with the kneeler, she carted it along on the move. Into storage it went, unused and mostly forgotten.
Then Terry recalled, “I go back to when we bought our house here and re-carpeted the bedrooms. The workers were going to seal up the vent in a large closet, but I had them leave it and carpet around the vent. I don’t know why, it just seemed right at the time.”
Fast forward to one very early cold winter morning in 2019.
“I was in bed but awake and thinking I should get up early and go pray,” she continued. “But I decided to stay warm and start my quiet time and prayers in the dark. For me, this type of prayer did not work very well, as I usually fell back to sleep. Sometimes that was fine, but as a practice, I found it best when I got up and made an intentional effort.
“I kept thinking ‘where could I go that would be as warm and quiet?’ and I heard, ‘you need to have a holy space to go, because you won’t always have a place to go for Mass.’ So I knew I was to create a quiet space I could use in my home, but I thought it was for when I simply couldn’t make it to daily Mass or for when I got much older and couldn’t get around.”
Not exactly.
Her quiet space was warm, with no distractions
After contemplating that prayer room, it wasn’t until late 2019 when Terry just felt that bedroom – and the closet with the heat vent – would be the perfect spot. She spent the weekend digging everything out, which took a lot of effort to empty and purge. “I didn’t want to use this space for anything but as a reverent place – when you have a job to do, you need suitable space. But what does a prayer space have when you’re a grandmother? I’m not like a nun in a convent. Then I recalled my kneeler from the priest.”
Terry cleaned up the kneeler. She remembered a statue of the Virgin Mary that had belonged to her mom and a precious crucifix she and her husband had purchased in Israel earlier that year. She completed her space with a chair and 24 years of her journals. It was perfect.
Simple. Inviting. No distractions.
Terry didn’t know the coming Covid-19 pandemic would force adoration chapels and local churches to close several months later. Nor did she think about retirement or that she would spend several hours a day working on her journal project.
“But now look at our world,” she reflected. “God gave me this beautiful place of prayer in my own home, knowing what I needed before I knew it.” This scripture verse comes to mind for her: Matthew 6:8 “…Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
What’s next?
Shortly after setting up her prayer room, Terry started one day by randomly grabbing an earlier journal to read.
“I was laying in bed, contemplating going back to sleep and felt the Lord call me to prayer. I was so excited to go to my new warm, cozy prayer room and snuggle up with Jesus. I had such a strong feeling that He wanted me to open an old journal and let Him give me a taste of why He had called me into retirement – and what these upcoming daily hours of reviewing my prayer journals would look like. Upon entering my prayer room, I spent about an hour praying for family when I felt the Lord ask me to grab an old journal setting in a box at my side.
“I reached down, randomly opened a journal and proceeded to read an entry: September, 2005. In it was a prayer I had written to the older sister of a hometown friend. Their mom and dad were leaving the family farm to go to a nursing home, and it was an especially difficult time for them. The older sister had requested I pray for them, which I find surprising now, as I never really knew the older sister. I had taken just a few minutes – that was 15 years ago – to write a quick prayer for the parents’ transition and for their family.
Terry continued, “I felt the Lord had drawn me to that particular prayer now. So I texted my hometown friend and decided to share with her a copy of my journal entry/prayer and that I was remembering her parents again today. Honestly, I thought maybe it was a special day for the parents who had by now passed away. Maybe an anniversary or something, and that receiving this message would be a nice gift to my hometown friend.
“This immediately became another WOW moment for me…when I received her return text message less than 20 minutes later. She proceeded to explain that right at that moment, the same sister was sitting at her husband’s bedside as he neared the end of life. She was so moved by God’s timing in this, that God would reveal those words from that original prayer at this very moment in time. She knew God was letting them know He was with them; there is no other explanation as to why, out of all those journals, that very entry would be the page I was led to open,” Terry exclaimed. “God is SO good.”
Re-reading this entry in her prayer room was the first day Terry experienced affirmation for her own transition.
“We don’t understand all of God’s ways, nor are His intentions necessarily revealed at the outset,” she marveled. “We wrap our minds around what we can understand at any point. But He knew I would have questions on what I was supposed to do next. To think that He would use a moment in time so many years ago, to console someone today. Well, I simply cannot wait to see what God is going to do with our time together tomorrow. My job is to show up and trust in Him.”
What about you?
So that’s her new task. Terry asked our Root and Bloom readers to take a leap of faith and trust with her.
“God is moving you in every conversation you have with Him,” Terry said, adding that she had an assignment for me as well. “My prayer for you is that, through your writing, God will open the floodgates of Heaven to all He calls to read it, drawing souls into intimacy with Him.”
Amen.
P.S.
Months ago, creating a journal for the Root and Bloom brand was a project low on our priority list. Too busy, no time to produce another product…it was easy to put our journal on the back burner, for a slower time.
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. Our calendar was suddenly wide open and we were homebound. Hmmm.
Thus, our journaling product took root and will be ready for release shortly. The journal is a simple design really…a way to track your faith journey and thoughts as you wish – reading, reflecting, responding. If you would like to be added to our pre-order/announcement list, just email rootandbloomforever@gmail.com. (If you’re in a group, consider a bulk order and let us know how many you’re estimating – no obligation.)
Consider our prayer journal a spiritual conversation starter – the pages are mostly blank on purpose – so you have room to write or ponder, create and doodle. When you keep it going over a period of time, we hope it’s an opportunity to deepen your relationship with God, and that it reveals how you grow through the ups and downs of your life.
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