A Game Changer for Personal Prayer

Does praying "Jesus, I trust in You" seem empty and ineffective? The Track Changer can dramatically improve personal prayer, helping us to pray more deliberately, consistently and effectively from the heart! Recently, when I was facing a little extra stress and anxiety, I learned something integral to effective prayer! While I've been taught that the effectiveness of our prayer does not rely on or become apparent through our feelings, there is something we can do to make our prayer more deliberate and consoling. I'm going to call it the track changer.

"A game changer for personal prayer" by Monica McConkey (CatholicMom.com)

By Petr Vins (2009) via Freeimages.com; CC0 Public Domain[/caption] Prayer isn't positive thinking or superstition. Trust is a huge part of prayer ... and trust and Faith is something that we are all on journeys to develop. When times are tough, when we're faced with our biggest challenges, praying "I trust in You" doesn't always feel authentic. The prayer "Jesus, I trust in You" is an active prayer. We're supposed to be choosing with our will to trust in Him, even if we don't feel all confident and faith-filled, consoled and unburdened.

But how is "Jesus, I trust I You" an active prayer if we're saying it over and over as we continue to worry and fret?

Worries tend to be either about future or past events. If we can try to appreciate what's good in the present moment, we might be able to train our thoughts away from worry. Easier said than done, but what comes to mind is the track changer. We've all used distraction to calm a distressed child. Perhaps we need to distract ourselves, changing the line of thought, stopping a cycle of worry or fear in its tracks. Most of us can agree that worrying is not helpful. While a certain amount of planning, anticipating what might go wrong can help us to be a little more prepared, dwelling on the anxiety and fear likely just unravels us further. When we pray "Jesus, I trust in You" or "Jesus, take this from me because I can't worry about it anymore," we might actually be able to surrender our angst more fully if we deliberately change tracks, steering our thoughts to something else. When we refuse to indulge in worry, when we cut short the rehashing of past events that have gone awry or deliberately stop anticipating the possible problems in our future, we may be better equipped to hand over our worries to Jesus.

Actively choosing to trust in Jesus and surrender our struggles to Him

... can mean actively arresting our useless and damaging train of anxious thought.

When we use Prayer Prompts as a reminder to not only pray, but change tracks in our thought patterns, we are taking action to actively live out our prayer of surrender. I have seen how the track changer has helped me cope better in difficult situations and how the prayer prompts have helped me to pray more consistently and meaningfully.