{My Prayer Notebook}

Lately I've been trying to come up with a more effective way of managing my prayer life. Perhaps this sounds very dry and rigid to you, but it really helps me to be organized in this way. It keeps my mind and heart focused, and it's always exciting to look back and see how the Lord has worked in my life and in the lives of loved ones.

I've used index cards and notebooks in the past, but I still found it hard to mark progress and remember where certain requests had been jotted down. So yesterday I asked the Lord if He would just bring along a method that would work for me. Of course He did, because He's so very dear like that.

I found a video tutorial through Pinterest that is very practical and "me," and set to work right away to recreate it and morph things a bit to be even more "me." (My version isn't quite so . . . intense.) My initial thought was, "Okay! Off to buy a binder and paper and dividers . . .!" But I realized that sometimes it's best to work with what we already have on hand.

So I looked through our mountains of supplies and finally found a perfect little binder. My mind tried really hard to come up with something easy in the way of dividers, and then it came to me. I already have some! Years ago, my sister made dividers for a home-keeping notebook for me. I've loved it to pieces, but lately found that, because of Pinterest and other online record-keeping methods, I just wasn't using it for that purpose anymore. So I'm in the process of updating them to become prayer dividers.

It was fun to look back through the tabs that once read, "Calendar" or "School" or "Shopping" and think that they will now become "Worship" or "Family" or "Friends" in my prayer life. It was especially funny to find the little post-it note that my sister had attached (ten years ago?) to the "Gifts" section, which I never removed: "The EXTRA LARGE section for the pages and pages titled: KRISTA!" (She likes presents.)

As it works out, that divider lands right where my "Family" divider will now be. So I'll keep her post-it note there, now devoting "pages and pages" to praying for her.

This morning I spent my quiet time copying verses, poems and hymns into the various sections: Worship, Me, Jamie, Kids, Family, Friends and Leaders. I look forward to this new season in my journey with the Lord.

* * * * *

The Lord has been teaching me lately to really dwell on the words of one of my favorite verses. A line of it, in fact, inspired my blog description:

Thou wilt make known to me the path of life; in Thy presence is fullness of joy.

Psalm 16:11 

I've recently been reading the works of Jim Elliot, and find his prayer life to be both humbling and inspiring. When he wrote of this same passage, I was all attention. He was referring to a decision that had to be made in his life and commented, "Yet I still cannot set down reasons for the decision, save this, that the Lord showed the psalmist the path of life, evidently by his simply lingering in His presence."

Oswald Chambers, too, wrote of a similar reality: "The questions that matter in life are remarkably few, and they are all answered by the words -- 'Come unto Me.'"

Spurgeon is succinct: "Dwell much with Him . . ."

And so, through this notebook, my prayer is that I might come, that I might linger, and that I might dwell. Because in His presence is fullness of joy.