Mark 5:21-24

It’s hard to know how to pray when someone dear is hurt or sick. When you don’t know whether to cry or be brave, the words get caught. But, whether we are eloquent or stuttering, He listens. In this 3-day plan, pray along with a mother who has spent significant time at the side of her little one’s hospital bed. Pray for healing, but also for peace and perseverance as God takes you through the difficult journey of caring for your loved one.

What does it mean to wait on the Lord? We wait on the Lord to answer our prayers, to act, to renew our strength, to deliver, to do what only God can do. We wait on him because he is God and we are not. As we wait on the Lord, he changes us, he strengthens us, we learn, and we grow in our faith.

Holy leisure is about finding rest and enjoyment in God’s presence, even when life’s circumstances are hard. The Gospel of Mark is full of examples of Jesus exemplifying this restful dependence on his Father, even when exhaustion, storms, and interruptions threatened to thwart his will. Experience a life of holy leisure as you learn to live, rest, and trust, like Jesus.

Saint Ignatius (www.PrayAsYouGo.com) believed that God could speak to us just as clearly in our imagination as through our thoughts and our memories. In his Spiritual Exercises he writes of contemplation as a very active way of engaging your feelings, emotions, and senses to place yourself in the scene described. Listen to the events of Jesus’ life described in these reflections.