12 Days of Reflection - #11: 1+1+1 Challenge

For the past month, our church has been participating in the 1+1+1 Challenge - a challenge to do 3 things:

1. 1 hour spent in prayer for our church each week
2. 1 hour spent in service each week
3. 1-time financial gift to be divided 50/50 among local and global impact

 Sounds easy, right?

The easiest one was #2.  Between worship team, tech team, Upward, and children's ministry stuff, this one was covered, and I am pleased to say this is part of our regular, everyday life.

I thought #3 would be the hardest.  We had just finished FPU when the challenge was first issued, and we had learned that since we are indebted to others, our money really isn't our own, and before we can give above and beyond our usual tithe, we must pay off our debts.  Well, there's no way that was going to happen before the end of 2013, so we had to do some creative negotiating with our budget to figure that one out.

#1 has proved to be the most difficult.  Grant has been saying all along that it averages out to just under 10 minutes a day.  Who doesn't have 10 minutes a day?  Um, me, apparently.  Focused prayer has always been a hard thing for me.  I'm really more of a situational or "sniper" pray-er, if you will.  I will pray about things on my mind, or people I know, or random people I see that I don't know, but I'm not great about focusing one one thing and praying about it for more than, say, 10 seconds.  Is there such a thing as prayer ADD?  I think I have it.  In my experience, my most heartfelt praying experiences are always when I write them out, but the time-manager in me cringes at this approach because I could get so much more into my prayer if I will just pray it instead of write it, but if I'm too distracted to stay on point, then what difference does it make???  Ugh...I'm getting frustrated just typing about it.  So while I haven't been a complete success in this department, the experience has caused me to realize that this needs to be an area of focus for me in 2014.

Which is the point of all of this - refocus and gear up for what God is going to do in 2014.  There is something amazing about being on the brink of a new year, thinking about everything that has happened in the past year, and what a different place we are in now than when we stared one year ago.  This is one of my favorite times of year for that reason!