Day 9 - Sleep?

So far, this prayer month has been pretty difficult, as far as my daily goals were.

It's been hard work finding time during the day to pray, even with Sacred Space, and Tam & I have prayed together a couple of nights, but certainly not EVERY night.

I don't think prayer should be a regimented kind of thing, like just doing it for the sake of doing it. That's not my aim here. I didn't set these goals so I could see how bad I am at praying; they are just good ideas of what I would like to be doing.

But then, maybe a more regimented way of doing things is actually what I need. Maybe I should set certain times in the day for me to pray, like the monks. I usually get up at 6am when Lily wakes up, so I could read my Bible then and pray for a bit. And then I could get onto Sacred Space for 10minutes at lunch time, 12pm.

Our bed times are all over the shop at the moment. Actually, maybe this is something we could work on.

I think I've realised that to get better at praying, it's not just a matter of squeezing more prayer into my normal days. I really need to make some lifestyle changes as well.

When I pray, I'm a lot more aware of myself. So with the extra prayer that's been going into this month, I've been thinking a bit more about how I'm actually doing. And what I'm noticing is that a lot of the time I am tired. It's hard to pray when I'm tired. I wake up in the morning and feel tired. I stop work halfway through the day to have a break, and within minutes I'm feeling tired. And in the afternoons, when Lily is starting to get cranky, I feel pretty exhausted. Coffee probably would help, but I'd rather keep coffee as something that I LOVE, rather than something I NEED.

I think I need more sleep.

They say you should get 9 hours of sleep a night. For me, that would mean going to bed at 9pm. Hmm... So basically I need to be a grandma.

Well, maybe I can try getting to bed by 10pm every night. 8 hours. Maybe that'll help me a bit.

If only I could convince Lily to wake up at 7am instead of six....