Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Learning How to Live Without Stress in my (Prayer) Life

Hello, everyone! Today I'm linking up with the beautiful ladies of Tuesday Talk, and I'd like to discuss how I am a recovering Control Freak, and I now to achieve stress-free living. Okay, not really, but kind of. See, stress is super lame. Stress makes me exhausted, cranky, crazy, worried, anxious, overwhelmed, and a bunch of other things that health professionals have probably laid out nicely in a list. You can look all over the internet for self-help articles that deal with stress-free living, but I'm not going to head that route. Instead, I want to talk about living stress-free in connection with another area. See, there's another source of stress that people really don't talk about much: prayer. 


I know, I know, you may be thinking, 
"Now, this is just plain silly. Prayer is NOT something to be stressed about!" 
It's true that prayer shouldn't be a source of stress. But, in my life, prayer can quickly turn into a stress-inducing crazy jumble of bleh. There have been numerous times in my life where the following situation takes place: Control Freak AnneMarie is Praying Lots, But All This Prayer is Making Her More Stressed. It's a thing, guys. Like I said earlier, though, stress is something that I try to avoid if at all possible. So, I've steadily been working to make sure that prayer no longer is a source of stress in my life. I'm not all the way there, but I've made definite progress over the past few years. 

For example, several weeks ago, I posted a prayer intention to a Facebook group that I'm in. One of the people commented, saying 
I'm praying, I know how worried you are about this! 
I didn't want to seem like a callous, heartless person, and I felt bad that other people who had no personal connection to my prayer intention were worried about it, so I just responded with a 
Thanks for the prayers! 
In all honesty, though, I wasn't worried and stressed about it. Nope, not an ounce of worry or stress. I really cared about the prayer intention, and it laid (and still lies) close to my heart. Yet, no stress-I was like, whatever, God's got this under control. Trust me, I haven't always been this way. Far from it, in fact! Like I said, I am a recovering Control Freak. So, if you want to read about how I have been trying to overcome stress in my prayer life, and how my prayer life caused stress in the first place, I'm over at Catholic365.com talking about "Striving for Stress-Free Prayer." 
Hint: Learning to live without stressful prayer may have something
to do with this quotation...

2 comments:

  1. So crazy, I was literally just thinking about how my being "too busy" to pray is making my prayer time stressed and hurried. I find myself "going through the motions" instead of connecting and TALKING. Your post hits a chord with me! - www.domesticgeekgirl.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gingi, I am so glad! That's pretty cool that this post could come when you needed it-God's timing is always perfect! :)

      Delete