What's a good prayer life? A Good Romance.

"What's your daily prayer life like?" I asked Jackie before she got out of the van. Jackie Francois and I had just had an amazing evening in Nashville, but this nagging thought kept creeping in and I needed affirmation from someone I knew was praying well. "Why do you ask?" Jackie responded.

I began to tell her, very disjointedly, about a struggle that's been on my heart for months. 

Am I praying enough? 

This question has brought me such anxiety over the past few months. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "Am I praying well? Oh no, I'm not praying well. Maybe I should add more prayer? More discipline?" and then spend the next 5 minutes saying to Jesus, "Have mercy on me, Jesus, a sinner. I do not know how to pray as I ought." I've asked almost every touring christian missionary I know about how we should be praying, and many of them have GREAT advice, but no answer was ever satisfying or brought a lasting peace. 

That is until this morning. 

I was writing in my journal about this struggle when I thought, "If you keep asking a question and the answers do not bear good fruit, maybe you are asking the wrong question." 

I remembered a dream I once had in adoration. I saw my soul as this small light, surrounded by darkness, with black tar all around it, covering it entirely. Desperate to set my soul free, I began to vigorously scrape at the tar covering it. But alas, the very moment I would clean one small spot,  the thick tar would begin to flow and cover the newly cleaned surface. As this continued to happen, I grew discouraged and hopeless. When the Holy Spirit appeared and invited me to change my perspective. He brought me through the tar, inside of it, where my light was. "Focus only on this light." He said, and as I did, the light began to grow. The tar became thicker, harder, and started to crack, and with a loud burst, all of the tar blew away as the light shot out, and there was no longer any darkness. And I was free.

The anxiety of the thought, "I don't want to neglect God, I want God to know I love him, I want to pray enough for Him" is selfish and wrong. And like focusing on the tar. 

I asked myself, "How would you feel as a wife if you knew your spouse had a checklist of the minimum things he had to do to adequately love you? And was satisfied when the list was complete?" "Do you love me?" I imagined asking him, "Why yes, I do," he responded, "today I completed the list. I made the bed, and told you that I loved you and spent 5 minutes talking to you before dinner." 

I was insulted. I was unsatisfied, "You don't love me," I thought, "You love yourself. The list is not about me, but about you! If you loved me you would love me in all things, not a list. I am more than a list." 

Band rehearsal with my  best friend, Tank, can be prayer if offered for the Glory of God. 

And then, I realized that this was how I was seeking to treat God. To ask Him, "what's a good daily prayer life, how many rosaries and divine mercy chaplets do you need from me to know that I love you?" is a bad question because it sets a boundary on infinite love. As if there is a limit on how much love I should be giving to God to satisfy Him. God doesn't want to be part of a checklist, He wants to BE the list. The only list. 

And this realization brought an explosion of peace. What's a good prayer life? A good romance. That's a good prayer life. I should gauge my fidelity by asking, Am I giving my God everything? Am I loving Him in everything?

Sometimes it will manifest in daily Mass, rosaries, divine mercy chaplets, and holy hours. But it will also manifest in making dinner for my roommates, writing new songs with my co-writers and folding laundry. My whole life is a prayer if lived for love of Him. My whole life is part of the greatest romance I will ever know. 

If I love God, and as a fruit of that, seek to please Him in everything I do, then I am praying enough.