Beyond The Pew - Episode 2 - Baby Steps in Prayer

Transcript:
Welcome to Beyond the Pew, my name is Matt Rice, President and Founder of Collaborative Catholic Formation Ministries, a youth ministry collaborative focused on igniting hearts, inspiring discipleship, and empowering families. Beyond the Pew is a ministry of CCFM focused on helping families strengthen or start conversations of faith at home. In the last episode, we focused on Jesus Christ, how everything in our lives points back to accepting Him into our life.
In this episode, we’re going to focus on how do we accept Jesus Christ into our daily lives and maintain a relationship with Him. This episode is about prayer. What is prayer? Simply talking to God. But let’s dive a little bit deeper.
In Matthew 25:1-13, we hear: “Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you; go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut. Afterward, the other maidens came also saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I say to you, I do not know you.’”
We are supposed to look to Christ as our bridegroom, as our spouse. And my guess is you would be hard pressed to find a couple who can maintain an intimate and close relationship without ever talking. I know that for me, if I was to skip maybe even a day, two days, of talking with my wife, we would be in trouble. (At least, I would be in trouble.) But sometimes I do just that with God and that makes even less sense.
Sometimes we stop talking to God for a day, a couple of days, a week, years, and the hard truth is that if we do this, we would be like those that cried, “Lord, Lord!” and He responded that He did not know them. They weren’t ready for their bridegroom when it was time for the feast. I don’t know about you, but to me that is scary. I want to be ready. I want to be among those whom He recognizes. If I truly want this, I need to be ready at all times and maintain a real relationship with Him daily.
This is truly not that difficult, all I need to do is be consistent and honest. That’s all it takes: consistency and honesty. That’s all we can actually do in prayer. Have a consistent time for God and be transparently open to our God.
We’re all busy, so no matter how little time I suggest that we make in prayer, someone is going to scoff at it and say they don’t have the time. What if I took the same approach with my family? What if I told my family that one hour a week was enough and that I get to decide when that hour would be? That doesn’t make any sense. And it makes even less sense with God. This is the God, the Creator of the Universe, who gives us life. That makes even less sense to tell Him that we don’t have time.  We have to get our priorities straight. God must be first. He must have a time of day that we dedicate to Him, and barring any emergency, we give to Him consistently.
So we need to pick a time of day that we can commit. That we’re going to give Him those five minutes a day. And during this time, we need to be honest. Imagine if your kids poured out the good, the bad, and the ugly to you, how awesome that would be. Imagine when your youth come home from youth group or from school and you ask them how their day was, and they actually told you instead of saying, “nothing.” They actually told you what their day was like and what it meant to them. This is what God wants to hear from us. Sure, He already knows what happened to us today, but He wants to hear us tell the story just like when we’ve already heard the news of the football game, we want to hear our kids tell it. We want to hear them tell the story. We want to hear what it meant to them. That’s what HE wants to hear from us. 
This is the first baby step that I’m going to challenge you to do. Find those 5 minutes and be consistent for 21 days. Consistent and honest. After that, add five minutes. Keep going. Keep growing in prayer. Once we, as parents, get our prayer life in order, then we can show our kids what a prayer life is truly like. 
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