Written By: Mark Gamez
These past few days have been extremely hot! With the extreme heat alert due to lack of rain and the intense humidity, everything and everyone is suffering. Too bad for me, I still have to work outside in it; I feel as if I am in the desert. Unfortunately, the weather is not the only thing that’s been dry as of late. Sometimes, in my spiritual life, things just get dry; my prayers are monotonous, boring, uneventful and painful to fulfill. I don’t doubt that this is a common struggle for all Christians. Naturally, I just hang on and tell myself to continue suffering in my prayer life, but just like anything, sometimes, change can resurrect and make new what has died or has gone old.
Since prayer is a conversation with God, so prayer must naturally change from time to time. Imagine, if a man took his girlfriend to the same places that he had taken her before, and that nothing has changed in their activities for years, then it would be obvious that their relationship would sooner than later become dry and uninteresting.
God is our beloved to whom we are called by His love to converse with him and actually speak to him.
In one occasion, my spiritual director instructed me to simplify my prayer to thanking God and in this one task, my own outlook to prayer changed and my own relationship took on a deeper meaning.
Gratitude to God is a well for the dry soul because gratitude presupposes us to search out and to take notice at what has been given to us from God. Gratitude makes us think back in our past in order to recognize all the little things and big things that our loving God has done for us. Once we begin to stop for a moment, reflect, and give thanks for all the little and big things that God has been faithful and generous to us. We recognize and come to a deeper realization of God’s love for us. From this understanding, our Faith has even more evidence for why we ought to believe God’s love for us. In giving thanks to God, we realize our dependency and our need for his generosity. In the dryness of the spiritual life, gratitude is a vital source of faith which.
Always give thanks to God even when you are angry with him, for from gratitude, you come to a greater understanding of God’s love because what he has done for us can no longer be hidden but made visible again through our memory.
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Suggested Reading:
God, I Have Issues: 50 Ways to Pray No Matter How You Feel
