February 12, 2025 “I’ll pray for you.” “You and your family are in my prayers.” “I’m praying for your intentions.” Sometimes it’s in an in-person conversation, sometimes in an online comment thread or email, but I’ve said some variation of those phrases eleventy billion times. To be completely honest, for years, I didn’t pray for a lot of those people. It wasn’t that I didn’t think their intentions were worthy of bringing to God in prayer. I wasn’t intentionally banishing people from my prayers. I just have the same amount of working memory as a large rock. At some point a few years ago, it occurred to me that I wasn’t being a very good member of the Body of Christ. We’re a family of faith. We’re called to pray for each other and support each other. And while it wasn’t intentional, telling people I’d pray for them and failing to do so was dishonest. Since it’s unlikely that my memory will improve, God and I had to come up with a way for me to participate in this part of Christian life, a way to remember to pray for people and their intentions. It took a while, and it took trying a few different methods. I tried sending myself text messages with names to remember later. I would look at it once and forget it forever. I tried adding prayer intentions to a calendar reminder that would go off at a set time every day. It turns out, I can ignore just about any reminder after I see it every day for a couple weeks. In the end, God brought me to a two-part method. First, I pray for the person/their intention immediately. Just a quick, silent prayer. Then, if it’s a situation that will be ongoing, a situation for which a person might need continuous prayer, I add those people/intentions to a note on my phone. Sometimes I’ll take the note out and pray for each person/intention individually, and sometimes I’ll just pray for “everyone on my prayer list.” Also, you’re all on that prayer list. There’s an entry for “the readers of the North Country Catholic.” “I’ll pray for you.” |
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