Prayer Stitches

Lately I've been coming up with some creative ways to pray.  I am not the best prayer warrior, my mind wanders, holding a silent conversation is difficult, and I'm ligitiamtly too scatter brained.  I've tried a lot of things and I've made some progress over the years, but in the last week I came up with some good ones that I can personally use and that make sense for me.  If you can get anything from this post, I'm glad. 

Prayers Arrows
So a favorite activity of J127ers is to shoot some arrows after class with the recurve bow we use.  I was really needing to prayer for a couple specific people, so I thought I'd have some quiet time alone outside.  On a whim I grabbed the bow in case I had extra time.  Then it dawned on me.  I can do both!  A thought paired with an action is more effective right?  So I set an arrow to the string, praying for one person, I raised and pulled the string back to my ear, still praying under my breathe.  Aim. Pray. Release. Done praying for person 1.  Continue on, designating every arrow for a person or issue.  It really worked.

Now we just finished a 3 day road trip to Colorado from New York.  On the way Carissa, a good friend and talented individual, taught me how to knit.  Get in touch with my inner domestic right?  I honestly didn't think I would be able to pick it up, let alone enjoy it!  But I did both with relative ease.  So the last couple days I've been knitting along, loving the metallic sound of the needles scraping over one another, totally reminiscent of a sword being draw, anyways, so I was knitting.  I remembered that I needed to be praying.  I thought that maybe prayer stitching would be great, a stitch per person.  Turns out, I go to fast to do a proper prayer in just one stitch so I switched to a person per row.  Just over and over, person after person, issue after issue.  Then a quiet listening time.

So I've now developed a way to pray that I can remember to have my talks with God without just sitting there.  Structured so I don't get lost, yet flexible.  I'm super excited.  Sad part is, we don't have the bow here, so I will just have to stick with prayer knitting.  God has a very ironic sense of humor.