Daily Prayer: There's at least one

Early in the still-short history of my Daily Prayer Page (published in September and updated weekly) I wondered if the cumbersome effort of typing the week's prayers and commemorations, and linking to the daily readings, was worth it.  I only rarely use my blog for my personal Daily Prayer.  When I do my Daily Prayer - and I have been less consistent in this practice as of late - I usually do it using a printout I keep inside the front cover of my Bible.

Then I looked at my Google Analytics numbers, and I noted that every day there is at least one visitor to the Daily Prayer Page.  Some days there were more, but the daily total never equaled zero.  There was always at least one visitor to my Daily Prayer Page.  Mind you, one visitor is not significant in internet terms, and even on my blog - which averages 70-90 visits per day, with occasional spikes and dips exceeding that range - one visitor is not much.

But then I thought about that one daily visitor.  Is it one person who comes to my blog each day to pray?  Or, is this daily visit actually a series of distinct websurfers, the function of an internet search engine algorithm sending folks to my blog?  I have no idea.  But the possibility that someone out there is praying daily on my blog has kept me going. 

Entering the new week's prayer,readings, festivals and commemorations has become an established part of my Wednesday evenings.  Even if my daily prayer practice is temporarily suffering as we learn how to balance life and work with a 3 week-old baby, a 16 month-old toddler, and a 4 year-old young lady, I've benefited from the practice of preparing these prayers. 

I just hope that I soon find the time and space to return to saying, rather than simply preparing, these prayers.

Comments

I am probably not your daily visitor since I have been reading the Daily Prayers only since the beginning of Advent. But I want you to know that these prayers have been important to me on the other side of the world from you here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I am an American Lutheran (I grew up in the precursers to ELCA, but my home congregation in San Francisco is LCMS).

There are many Vietnamese-language evangelical protestant congregations here in HCMC (mostly planted by Koreans, it seems), but I have been unable to find an English-language congregation. Both ELCA and LCMS center their operations in Hanoi and seem to have no presence in HCMC. After a couple of years, I now realize I need to plug back into the community of Christ, and I have started with your blog.

I believe it is more important for you, however, to switch your time to your personal prayers and your family. With some effort on my part, I know I can find continuing resources, probably from the ELCA and LCMS websites. God bless you in your work.