Prayer reminder! ACTS covers your bases

Last night, we got up to the chapter about fortitude in our current catechism read-aloud, How To Be a Hero: Train With the Saints.

Sometimes we decide to make a change in our lives,

it says,

like giving up sweets for Lent or making a New Year’s resolution to keep our bedroom neat. At first, we are able to keep our resolution out of excitement and because it is something new. Eventually, though, it becomes more difficult to wake up each morning and make the bed, or turn down an offer of candy from a friend.

And is said, “SHUT UP, BOOK! YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” Ha ha, just kidding. We had just barely recovered from a conversation about whether it was, in fact, fartitude we needed to cultivate in our house (answer: No.), so I wasn’t going to derail Edification Hour again. But I thunk it.

One of my resolves for Lent was to reinvigorate my prayer life. It . . . has not been going well. I wish I could say it’s due to the mid-Lent doldrums, but it actually petered out almost immediately.

Happily, this morning I suddenly remembered a strategy for daily prayer that even I can manage. You cover ACTS:

Adoration,
Contrition,
Thanksgiving,
Supplication.

Or, as I used to tell my kids, it’s telling God:

You are great!
I’m sorry.
Thank you!
Please?

What else is there to say? If you can make the sign of the cross and thoughtfully make a personal expression of each of these things to God in the morning, then son, you have reinvigorated your prayer life. Fortitude!

(I purposely left the image at the top nice and big, in case you want to click on it and print it out for your wall. Obviously I just something I threw together with a marker, which you can easily replicate and do a better job with, but maybe you can’t find a marker.)

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3 thoughts on “Prayer reminder! ACTS covers your bases”

  1. Simcha, I would love to see a hits/misses post about your Edification Hour read-alouds! My stepkids are new to the Church and I’m always looking for new kid-friendly home catechesis material recommendations.

  2. Fartitude….

    I just had flashbacks to my childhood… If the proverbial ‘Vietnam Flashbacks’ were comic, that is exactly what I just experienced. We went through a rotating faze of boys trying to work toilet humor into EVERY situation possible. No circumstance was safe, much to my mother’s dismay. They do grow up… mostly… Or at least, they learn that fart jokes are a sometimes joke eventually. 😛

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