When Advent began last year, I committed myself to a year-long experiment and to being public about its progress by writing about it here. The gist of the experiment was that I would push my own advice from Live Prayerfully to its farthest reasonable limit by doing all of the things I talk about in the book every day for a year. (The book doesn't encourage anyone to do all of the stuff all the time–I'm intentionally trying to take things to an extreme.) I was able to stick with it for quite a while, even if it wasn't all very pretty (for a couple of examples, see One Dog, Two Cats, and Four Attempts to Pray and My Bad Christmas Prayer Idea). But then, around the end of February my streak ended of legalistically doing everything I set out to do, when I didn't realize that I had missed morning prayer until I sat down to read midday prayer.

In itself, that wasn't that big of a deal, but–like how in your house when one thing breaks, three or four others are likely to follow–after the streak ended, my experiment began to go downhill. Generally I've kept things up, but it's become more common for me to realize when I go to bed at night that I didn't do something that I'd committed to do as part of this year.

Part of that is due to the fact that I haven't been writing about it. The "40 Days of Prayer" posts that went up daily during Lent occupied all of the writing opportunities I had during those weeks, so apparently my abilities to stick with commitments is weak enough that if I wasn't writing about them, I also became less likely to do them.

But now–the writing project for Lent is behind me, and we're a week into Easter, so I think it's appropriate to resurrect the commitment to the experiment.

–––

Something I've prayed this week:

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Third Sunday of Easter from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 24th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]