This year for the first time in while I decided to participate in Lent. I didn’t give up anything, I decided to be more intentional with prayer during these 40 days. I figured a Lent Bible verse study would be great to complete and it seemed manageable. To find a study, I went to Pinterest and found this one:
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| Stephanie Adele’s 2018 Bible Reading Plan |
I thought instead of just reading the verse each day, I would be more intentional with it and pray along side these verses. I wanted to open my heart more and to understand and revel more in His love and sacrifice.
I decided that I would write these prayers in a notebook I found in my closet. I hadn’t opened this particular notebook in a very long time. When I pulled this notebook out, I was surprised to find pages and pages of handwriting. I sat down and decided to read it. I was shocked and very pleasantly surprised to find these writings were from March-April 2016.
These writings were a novena I had prayed for 9 days at the same time each day in 2016. I was truly struggling a lot during this time in a lot of different areas in my life. I think this was a last ditch effort in my mind. After reading through the pages and pages of prayers, I smiled. My prayers were finally answered after so many years. God’s time is always perfect.
I knew this was the perfect book for my study this year. I wrote my focus, the how and my hopes out on a page and then I wrote each verse with the corresponding day on the next page- all 40 days out for a quick reference.
I would start out each day with a prayer on the front of the page and then on the back I would write the day, the verse and my takeaway from that verse. I found it interesting that somedays my prayers would line up perfectly with the verse for that day. Sometimes my takeaways were my thoughts about the verse, somedays it was parts of the verse that really hit home and other days it was just the whole verse because it was powerful.
While I would love to report back to you that I completed the full 40 day study…. I did not. I did this study for 20 days and I stopped. There wasn’t a specific reason for stopping and I thought about going back to it but I didn’t. I gave myself grace for not completing it and perhaps this taught me something more than actually finishing the study. It’s okay to step back and take a look at the full picture.
The full picture was my intention to be more intentional with prayer thinking a study would be helpful for me. While I might not have finished the study, I did find myself in quiet moments, praying more. I was surprised by this when I realized what I was doing and I always leaned into it. Maybe this Lent season I learned that prayer can be done anywhere, any time and in any format.
I also learned that prayers might not be answered right away and it might take YEARS for them to be answered but in some way some how they will be answered. God’s timing is always the right and perfect time.
To close this post, I will leave you with this I found on Instagram, I found it really interesting especially since I was always told I had to give something up for Lent. I like this different perspective on this season.:
[[A lot can happen in three days]]
