30 Days of Praise

Today at the faculty fellowship, we had our regular time of prayer. One of the attendees shared something she recently started doing with some of the female faculty who meet regularly to pray—committed to something called 30 Days of Praise. Apparently it has its origins in a book of the same name. I’d never heard of it, but as it so often happens, this evening at a cousin’s house, I saw the book on her coffee table. It’s amazing what you see when you know it exists.

Anyway, I asked the woman at the prayer gathering what was meant by “30 Days of Praise.” It could mean something completely trivial all the way up to refusing to ask God for anything for a month and only praising Him in regular prayer time. She explained that it was simply everyday finding something to consciously praise God for with the purpose of lifting our eyes to higher things than merely the problems in front of us that consume our energy through worry.

This reminded me of something Pastor said on Sunday:  everyone prays, even atheists. If you are worried about something, then the act of worrying is a prayer for it to turn out alright. It may be directed at nothing, but it is in a real sense, a prayer.

Another friend has said for years that if you focus on your problems instead of Jesus then your problems become big in your eyes and Jesus becomes small. However if you focus on Jesus, He approaches His true size and you problems shrink accordingly.

The ladies in the prayer group have gotten journals to record their praises for accountability purposes and to be able to visualize the volume of praise due Him. It’s not a bad idea. So I will do the same, here. The end of every post will be a daily praise for the next month. Feel free to join in.

Praise 1:  I am truly amazed and in awe of the infinity of the Almighty. No matter how big I try to picture Him in any metric, He is greater still, by scales I cannot imagine. A small example:  how He loves 7 billion individuals as if each were the only person in all of existence, without tiring of them. There are times I’m tired of myself. That He isn’t is beyond praiseworthy—it’s beyond imagining.

SDG