EDITED TO ADD: I had scheduled this post for while I was traveling and it went out to the paid list which it should not have. So I’m resending it in the hope that you have the opportunity to play this month.
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As this arrives in your inbox, I have just walked into my parents house in the United States for the first time. We have already attended a series of family events with my husband’s side of the family after making our first trip back home in three years.
Before I moved to Germany, my parents moved out of my childhood home to this new place that I’m visiting for the first time. I couldn’t visit before we went because there was a flurry of last minute of activity before our move. Army moves don’t come with a lot of advance notice. This job came out of the blue for my husband and he seized the opportunity to move his family abroad and expand and deepen his knowledge outside of the jobs he usually does. So this will be the first visit in their new home that I have previously only seen though FaceTime.
Many things will look familiar even in the new house. I will recognize my grandparent’s furniture that has been passed down from generation to generation in new places. I feel the comfort of couches that I used to fall asleep on after school years ago but it will be different.
I will be different. We are always growing and changing. We read new books and meet new people. We gaze at different vistas and get challenged to see the world differently so that even when we return to the familiar, it feels different than it did before.
Prayer can be like that too so that we can repeat familiar practices and find something we didn’t find the first or second or third time we tried it. It might not have felt like the right thing then but it resonates now. (There can also be be inverse effect where it worked before and totally doesn’t feel right now.) It has been over a year of offering these different monthly practices here on Prayer Threads and I’m reflecting on what connected most with me. I want to invite you to revisit past practices that are now collected together in this section.
Or you might feel so moved to engage again with some of my favorites that I’m sharing here. Play with them. Return to them and see what God might show to you that you didn’t experience the first time.
As you enter into this July practice, here are some questions for reflection and prayer.
How does your spirit engage with what is familiar?
Where are you finding opportunity to play with your prayer?
How does God respond to your exploration of the familiar?
What more do you long to find in your prayers?