Skip to main content

The Rosary; Making Time

The Rosary is a powerful prayer which offers a great deal in the way of spiritual growth. However, as with anything that is worth doing, committing to pray the Rosary on a daily basis is not without its difficulties. The Rosary is a long prayer of contemplation. To pray a full Rosary takes about an hour. For this reason many of people pray just one chaplet a day.Still, this is a 15 to 20 minute commitment.

Most of us are very busy with work and school to attend to and kids and houses to care for. Finding a solid hour for prayer is very difficult. Even finding 20 minutes may take some creativity and/or sacrifice. Whatever it takes, you will be rewarded with the spiritual growth and closeness to God that we all seek as is our nature.

So, what are some ways that we can find the time we need to pray the Rosary on a daily basis?

I am a morning person so the first thing that comes to mind for me is getting up 20 minutes early. I have been doing this for a while and it works very well for me. The house is quite so there is little to distract me from my contemplation and I meet my commitment to God first thing and my day is blessed because of it. I have started my day in prayer to God and I hope that the prayer and time with God guides my day and helps me to more fully live the Christian life.

Praying a full Rosary all at once is even more difficult to do, mostly because we have to carve out an hour from an already overloaded day. That being said, I have found the practice of praying a full Rosary to be very rewarding. That being the case I would ask, how many of us find an hour to commute to work? How many of us find an hour to exercise? Is there something that you are doing for an hour that does not require your full metal attention? If there is, then you have time to pray a full Rosary.

I am an avid runner. About a year ago, I put up the ipod and began praying a full Rosary on my runs. Again, this works very well for me. I don't know that I would always make my runs, but committing to pray the Rosary while I run gives me an extra boost to get out there when my inspiration to run wains.

Some other suggestions that may work for you would be to pray the Rosary as you lie down to sleep at night. That wouldn't work for me because I would fall asleep, but it might work for you. How long is you drive to work? Is it long enough to pray a chaplet of the Rosary on your way? What about while you grocery shop? What do you do on your lunch hour? Would you consider praying the Rosary during that time? I am sure you can think of other times when you can find 20 minutes to contemplate the Life of our Lord in the Rosary. I would just encourage you to consider seeing if you can find time to take up the Rosary.

As always, I would be interested to hear about your experiences with this pray. Use the comment box below.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...
4 comments
Read more

The Rosary: Staying Focused

There are several obstacles that someone who has committed to pray the Rosary will face. Since the Rosary is a long prayer one of the biggest challenges I face is staying focused. If you have read my other posts or if you are just familiar with the prayer, you know that the mental contemplation of the Mysteries is the main focus of the prayer. So getting distracted really detracts from the prayer. Even if I am only praying 1 chaplet of the Rosary, it still takes about 20 minutes. In that amount of time your mind is bound to wander some. I have found several different things to help me when my mind begins to drift off to the worries of everyday life. The first is to understand that this is going to happen and be watching for it. If I am not vigilant I can get through a whole decade and realize I have not thought one single time about the Mystery that I should have been contemplating. So before I begin the prayer I make a conscious determination to be watchful of my wandering mind. O...
3 comments
Read more

My AMDG Run: An Answered Prayer.

I have never been a person to pray for specific favors. It never felt right to me. My prayers generally are for strength, guidance, an acceptance of what comes my way. That is always how I "felt" right praying. To pray for a specific favor like a good grade, to do well in some competition and things like that just always felt a little wrong and to pray for physical healing was something I never would have considered. I am not saying this was any kind of selflessness. I am not sure exactly what it was. A fear of seeming childish or perhaps it was out of fear that my faith would be shaken if the prayer wasn't answered. Regardless, this is how I generally pray. And that is not to say that I don't or didn't think that God doesn't concretely answer prayers. I believe that He does. For instance I have always prayed when overwhelmed something like "God, I cannot do this all alone, please help me" and I will somehow, someway find my way through whatever it...
3 comments
Read more