Please Excuse our Mess! 

We are in the midst of redesigning our site, so things are in a bit of a mess! We should be much better in just a day or two!

Grab a cup of coffee or tea, get comfortable, and explore what God has for you today. At Only By Prayer, we’re all about helping you to bring the sacred into the everyday. Perhaps you’d like to read a relevant blog post, listen to a short Reflections podcast, or learn something new about prayer. If you’d like you can also participate in our Prayer Across America Journey.  These and many other discoveries await you. Be sure to let us (Mary and Jane) know what you think by leaving a comment, and thanks for the visit!

Saturday morning found me zooming along on my bike to the butcher shop for my weekly shopping. There’s something freeing about relying on your own power to get you around the city, and I love pedaling along the Monon Trail whenever I can. A wrong turn on the way home brought me through this neighborhood. Tired from the heavy load in my purple bag, I took a minute to rest under the scarlet maple tree.

It was easy to see God’s creativity everywhere I looked. “It won’t be hard to find my Sacred Everyday here,” I thought. The Sacred blazed brilliantly right into my Everyday morning.  Thanks for

sunshine,

            trees full of color,

                                              the breeze on my face,

                                                                                            crisp autumn air,

                                                                                                                        Butcher shop treats,                               my bike,

                                                                   and a peaceful morning

bubbled through my mind. How often do I miss the simple pleasures of life because I don’t slow down enough to see them? Open my eyes to your Sacred Everyday, Lord. Open my eyes.

I am excited to post my first Sacred Everyday moment. If you’re not sure exactly what I’m talking about, read this post and you’ll understand.

Today I signed on to Facebook and was greeted by this post from my son.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was staring at a full-fledged answer to prayer. I had been praying for my son for many years, and right if front of my eyes for all the world (at least Facebook world) to see was this post. Yeah! God is good. And I hadn’t even been bugging Jesse about getting baptized. I was quiet and let God be God and work in his life. Galatians 6:9 flitted across my mind as I held my own little happy-dance party:

“So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.” (NLT)

God collided this Sacred Everyday moment right into my everyday, and I didn’t even have to look to find it!

What about you? Have you noticed a Sacred Everyday today? Please share it below, as momentous or as everyday as it may be. We never know where or when the two will intersect.

Pray on!

One of my passions is finding the sacred in the everyday, like our tagline says. While I love special holidays and holy days, I don’t want to wait just for those times to draw close to God. I want to sharpen my sense of Him every day. But it’s too easy to get caught up in the daily details of living and forget to look for Jesus right where I am.

Record God’s Fingerprints

I’ve challenged myself to record His fingerprints in my life: as many times a week as I can, I am going to post a picture and a few words about where or how I’ve seen Jesus that day. It may be through a person, a place, a thing, or an idea. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, trying to become more aware of that thin space where heaven and earth meet. I’m excited to capture what often goes unnoticed — His sacred meeting my everyday. I hope you’ll join me — and share some of yours too.

Pray on!

 

 

 

 

When my children were little, I would often find their little sticky handprints all around the house, especially on the windows and sliding glass door in the kitchen. I could see the perfect outline of their tiny hands and noses where they had leaned in to the window pressing against it to eagerly watch snowflakes falling or a hungry bird at the feeder. Those little prints said, “I lingered here. This was important.”

Last Wednesday, Mary and I launched our first online Bible study, The Simple Life (still plenty of time for you to join us if you would like). In the first week’s lesson, author Cynthia Heald asks a question on page 16 of Becoming a Woman of Simplicity: “What do you sense the Lord is saying to you about what a life lived in single-minded devotion to Him would look like?”

To me it looks like a handprint ~ God’s handprints.

I like looking for God’s handprints in His world, particularly in the little, simple, often-overlooked things in nature. They’re there, all around us, but it takes time and intent to see His handprints in the small things. And in a typical over-scheduled day in my life, I don’t leave myself much time to slow down and savor things.

I wonder how much I’m missing.

What small gifts has God put right under my nose that I’m missing because I’m not looking for them? Instead, I have my eyes firmly fixed on my schedule, complete with my check-off-the-next-thing-on-my-list glaze in my eyes.

I love that this study makes me reevaluate what I’m doing. And one thing I want to do is to put my eyes on God so that I don’t miss His handprints that say “I lingered here. This is important.” Each one is a gift. Sometimes the gift is purely for my enjoyment, as when I bask in the radiance of a creamsicle-orange sunset. Or when I see the smooth, mahogany acorn nestled among the rocks and leaves in the woods. Other times these small gifts hold a lesson for me to discover, like the methodical persistence I see in the caterpillars I captured in the amazing video below. I almost missed that, but fortunately, God got my attention.

I want God’s sacred and my everyday to meet in a holy collision of life lived in single-minded devotion to Him. I want to see His sticky handprints wherever I go. That’s my answer.

Pray on!

photo credit: Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) via photopin cc (Changes added in PicMonkey)

As I was working in my garden tonight, I was delighted to see five caterpillars (I think they’re monarchs) on my dill plant! What a treat to get such a close-up view of them doing what they do best–eating. I love observing the small, often unseen creatures in nature. As you may or may not know, the tag line to Only By Prayer says “where the sacred and everyday meet.” When I take time to stop and intently look at the little things in life, that is one way I am ushering the sacred into the everyday.

I ran into the house to get my camera to capture these fascinating critters. Take a look below. I was able to capture it in mid-bite!

httpv://youtu.be/RJTLZcVbrbo

The life cycle of the caterpillar and its metamorphosis into a butterfly (or moth) is a wonderful analogy to our lives with Christ. When we give Him control of our lives, He is able to transform our lives into a thing of beauty — to a degree that we would never be able to attain on our own. It does take some work on our part, though. Just like the caterpillars are muching away gluttonously to fuel their transformation, we also need to be taking in God’s word and participating in spiritual disciplines to grow. God has put the food in front of us, but if we don’t eat it, we’ll never realize the potential that He has given to each one of us.

Let’s munch away today!