Prayer can be hard. You’re going along in your prayer life, you have a consistent routine down, then something happens, and life becomes busy. Or maybe you haven’t prayed in so long, you don’t know where to start. Or worse yet, you feel like you don’t have to, and you can handle everything on your own. There are many excuses, but none of them are good enough to allow life without prayer.
In this article I hope I can provide you with some tips and advice on what to do when praying gets tough.
Figure Out Why Prayer is Difficult
The first step is to identify what happened. Many times we can fix a problem or change things around to make more time for prayer. Or we may see that a situation is temporary, and prepare to pray as we used to once the situation changes again. If you don’t
Here some common reasons that prayer can be difficult. This is not an exhaustive list, and you may have a reason not mentioned.
- Discouragement- having a prayer life may be easy when life is going your way, but when you keep praying and bad things keep happening, it’s easy to wonder why you should pray.
- Impatience-when we have so many other things we would rather be doing, and prayer just seems to drag on, we just don’t feel like continuing.
- Change in schedule- life is busy enough, and then things change and you have to deal with a different kind of busy. A change in schedule can leave us feeling overwhelmed and disoriented.
- Lack of confidence- sometimes we feel so insignificant, like we don’t deserve to have our prayers heard or God wouldn’t hear any prayers from us.
- Don’t want to bother God- this is similar to the reason before this one. Basically with this one you may feel like your petitions in your prayers are so small, and you don’t want to bother God when He could be helping other people with bigger problems.
- Sloth- one of the deadly sins or vices. Essentially it’s a lack of motivation to forego our comforts for something better. Why pray for 1/2 hours when you could be watching the next episode in the show you’re binging on?
- Don’t feel like you have to- this is very common nowadays. Many people believe that because God is so merciful, there is no need to put any effort into following Him or talking to Him. These people believe that no matter what they do, they are going to go to Heaven, and that God’s justice does not really have any role. This is a sin called presumption.
- Pride- another one of the deadly sins. With pride, we believe we can do and handle everything on our own. Why bother talking to God when you can take care of it? The problem is that pride blinds us to the harsh truth that we really can’t accomplish any good without God.
- Not knowing how to- for many people, they have never been taught about prayer or what praying actually is. Some people may think it’s formulaic, “if I say this prayer in this way this will happen.” Or they may think that they need to just ask for things and that’s it. There is more to prayer, and a certain attitude that you need to approach prayer with. Luckily it’s very simple to learn!
Finding Your Motivation
In order to change, you have to actually want to change. So if you want to improve your prayer life, you need to actually want to pray! This can be very difficult, especially if you find yourself in the list of reasons why people stop praying.
So why should you pray? Well we need to if we expect to have any sort of relationship with God. Imagine never talking to someone and expecting there to be a loving relationship there! People are made by God to need communication. Talking to others builds our relationship with them. The same thing happens with God. Although He will always love us unconditionally, we are not like that ourselves, and we need to talk to God regularly to actually love Him like we’re supposed to. Prayer is a necessity in our spiritual life, and without it we will not survive this journey toward God.
Prayer makes us better
It is simply impossible to lead, without the aid of prayer, a virtuous life.
Saint John Chrysostom
With prayer we become more virtuous. Pursuit of virtue not only makes us closer to God and good people, it makes us better all around. Virtues give us strength and patience in tense situations. They give us courage and fortitude to face down fear. And they help us know what we should do in certain situations. Virtues are important, and every Catholic should spend their life becoming as virtuous as they can. And yes, like St John Chrysostom said, prayer is needed for this to happen.
Christ wants us to pray
Christ served as an example to us. He would often go somewhere to be alone for His prayer. He taught us the importance of persistent prayer in the parable of the unjust judge. Christ told us that we should pray in private, and avoid vain repetitions. He wanted us to understand that prayer is personal, and very important. He even taught us a prayer Himself that we all know, the Our Father.
Prayer is effective
Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.
Matthew 21:22
Jesus made it clear that prayer can do great things. And this is demonstrated again and again throughout the lives of the saint. You may even know people today who had great success in prayer. Prayer may not be answered in the way we want, or we might not see the immediate results, but it has great power.
We need protection
We are in a constant spiritual battle for our souls. The devil and his minions want to tempt us and destroy us. They love to do this unnoticed and in the shadows, so many times we don’t even know we are under attack. A regular and structured prayer life helps fortify our souls from these attacks. Prayer is how we fight this battle, and we cannot fight it through our own willpower.
Tips on getting back into prayer
So now that we know some common reasons you may fall out of a regular prayer life, and now that we know why we should pray, let’s discuss some actions you can take to make this happen! Prayer is an act of will, in which we turn our hearts toward God. This will not happen on its own and we need to take action to get back into prayer. We need to choose prayer.
- Frequent the sacraments- confession and holy communion are needed to clean our souls from sin and strengthen our souls against the wiles of the devil. We need spiritual strength to fight for our desire to pray, and the devil certainly wants to keep us from praying.
- Start small- if you never had a structured prayer life or it’s been awhile since you have, you need to start small. Start with a couple prayers and let the Holy Spirit guide you into choosing more. Being overwhelmed with having too much to pray can be discouraging.
- Appeal to your patron saints- those saints you have a special connection to, your confirmation saint, the saint you’re named after. These are all special saints that are assigned to help you through your spiritual life. They can help you figure this out.
- Split up your prayer time- if you don’t have time for your desired prayers, pray them at different times throughout the day. It’s way easier to pray more when you split it up rather than trying to pray everything in one sitting.
- Research new prayers- maybe you need to find new devotions and prayers. Maybe you’re getting bored with a certain devotion and want to see what else it out there. Luckily the Catholic Church has so many prayers and devotions, you should have plenty to choose from.
- Ask God how to pray-prayer can be difficult, but if you lift your heart in an earnest petition to Our Lord for help, He will help you. Asking God for help in prayer is such an incredible way to grow closer to God, because He will instill into your heart what you need to know. And by the way, this counts as a prayer in itself!
- Schedule time for prayer- I know you may think you’re busy, but if you cut out TV and social media, you will find a lot of wasted time that could be used for prayer. And scheduling a time can help you commit to prayer for that specific part of the day.
- Trust in God- this one takes practice, but you need to continue to remind yourself that God wants you to pray. He desperately wants you to talk to Him! Each and every one of us are called to pray, whether we believe we deserve to or we believe that we don’t need to.
- Humility- you’ll find as you progress through the spiritual life that we need humility. Pray for it and continuously make decisions to be humble.
So start praying!
Hopefully I have given you some tools in this article to help you get back into the prayer life. Find out what sort of blocks you have that are keeping you from prayer. Get inspired to pray again. Come up with a plan to make it happen!
Saints on prayer
The saints, of course, understood that prayer is a necessity in the spiritual life. So to give you some extra motivation or advice, I’ve included some quotes to think about.
Everything that one turns in the direction of God is a prayer.
St Ignatius of Loyola
For me, prayer means launching out of the heart towards God; it means lifting one’s eyes, quite simply, to Heaven, a cry of grateful love from the crest of joy or the trough of despair; it’s a vast, supernatural force which opens out my heart, and binds me close to Jesus.
St Thérèse of Lisieux
The body is our cell, and the soul is a hermit who stays within in the cell for praying to the Lord and for meditating on Him.
St Francis of Assisi
Have patience in persevering in the holy exercise of meditation, and be content to progress in slow steps until you have legs to run and wings with which to fly.
St Padre Pio
All I need is a quiet corner where I can talk to God each day as if there was nothing else to do. I try to make myself a tool for God. Not for myself, but only for Him.
St Edith Stein
Silence is a gift of God, to let us speak more intimately with God.
St Vincent Pallotti
The best preparation for prayer is to read the lives of the saints, not from curiosity, but quietly and with recollection a little at a time. And to pause whenever you feel your heart touched with devotion.
St Philip Neri
Prayer reveals to souls the vanity of earthly goods and pleasures. It fills them with light, strength and consolation, and gives them a foretaste of the calm bliss of our heavenly home.
St Rose of Viterbo
Prayer are those ways by which we might begin to repair all that has become broken. Without prayer, making amends is nearly impossible.
St Teresa of Ávila