20(21) Days of Prayer: Intro and Schedule
Good Evening Mosaic.
We hope you were able to join us online today.
Sorry about those the internet. If you haven’t yet, you can watch on YouTube. We explain a little of what we are going to explain below.
Every year, we start the year with 21 days of prayer. We have been doing this as a community for 7+ years at this point. It is part of our communal rhythms. … In some small way it is way to seek the Lord first, to find vision, to listen for his voice, and to see what he would have for us for the coming year. It is also good timing for “resolutions.” Starting the year right, trying to create new habits, try something new.
But as much as anything, we want it to be a gentle reminder of the importance of prayer in our lives, and a continued way of learning and practicing to pray.
As believers, we realize that we are citizens of the future reality of Heaven. The dream of the church at large is to see that future emerge in the here and now. The church does this as a community by creating space for individuals to experience a deeply formative life together, pulling them into the mystery of Jesus Christ and carrying those mysteries into a watching world.
This formative life is cultivated by certain practices that followers of Jesus have been giving themselves to for hundreds of years. Disciplines such as prayer, fasting, silence, giving, and confession are practices that, in a healthy rhythm, can help ground our lives and help us cultivate an acute awareness of God’s presence around.
We find that it is important as a community to continue to highlight and implement these practices. And prayer being the chief among them. So, at the beginning of every year we set aside time to focus on cultivating a prayer life as a community and as individuals. Often times this is done with some sermons on prayer and these longer corporate prayer times, that if we are honest are often times intimidating and unrealistic to sustain for the entirety of the year.
This year, because of the cards we were dealt with covid we want to take a slightly different approach. We want to focus on small, simple ways, to incorporate prayer and reflection throughout the day. Learning how to, maybe reintroducing, little ways to create a life aware of the presence of God always with us.
How this looks PRACTICALLY for Mosaic this year:
We will still have two corporate times each week that we pray together. They will be online (because of Covid) and shorter (30 minutes). They will also be a little more guided. These times will be extensions of what we are already doing individually and in our homes, just together. Those two times will be at noon on Wednesdays and 6:00a on Fridays.
We will also be providing a reading plan. The idea with this plan is to read the passages at two different times throughout the day. So you may read one in the morning and the other at bedtime. Or midmorning and dinner. Maybe lunch and bedtime. You get the idea. The point is to find little moments through out the day.
The readings for this week will be posted on social media already and a second blog posted at the same time as this.
We will also be posting a shortened version of a booklet that we did together corporately a few years back. This is simply a guided way to pray for 10-15minutes. You can do this with one of the readings or on its own. Maybe first thing in the morning with a reading, or find a time in between classes, during lunch, or while your toddler naps.
We will provide one other resource. It is a second way to guide you through a time of prayer, it is intended to be done at the end of the day or at bedtime. Again, this could be done with a reading or on its own. But we will give you a series of questions and ways to reflect on the day and look for where the Lord was leading and guiding. It’s a few minutes, 5-10, to create some space for quiet and reflection. We are even going to be helping parents incorporate this into their family life and teach their children how to do this. Albeit a little less quiet. That blog is posted as well.
If you already have some quiet time structure that you follow, or reading plan you started on January 1st - do that instead. Or if you have other resources, that is okay. What we are hoping to train ourselves to be a community that pursues the presence of God daily. That gives themselves to life forming habits, you can still watch Netflix and pursue Instagram. The infinite feed will always be there and there is nothing wrong with scrolling it through it. We just want to prioritize space for the Lord to speak to us. To pick these moments where we allow Glory to break through and overwhelm us instead of just doing whatever. We create some intentionality to our routines and lives.