Start Your Day with Prayer

One of the standard pieces of marriage advice that many Christian counselors give is to make sure that you take the time to pray together. While that is great advice, many couples struggle to find a time when they can actually take a few minutes to sit down and pray. Our hurry-up-and-wait schedule seems to make it extremely hard to find time to say “Hi” to each other, let alone sit down and pray together.

My wife and I work out of our home. In addition to the ministry, we both have businesses that we run out of our home. You’d think that would make it easy for us to find time together, especially time to pray. Unfortunately, it’s not all that easy. Even though we share an office, share a bedroom, and even occasionally eat together, it’s hard to find time to pray together. Not that we don’t pray, but we have trouble finding a time to pray together. Our schedules just don’t seem to mesh all that well.

We find some great wisdom for this in Genesis, where it says that God “walked with Adam in the cool of the day.” I had always thought of that as the evening; that is, I thought that way until I moved to South Texas. Evenings here aren’t cool, their hot. The cool of the day is the early morning, before the sun has a chance to heat things up.

So, in other words, Adam communed with God before doing anything else. If you think about it, that really makes sense. Why do anything else, before taking time out to talk to God about it? If we don’t take the time to get with God, then we’re setting ourselves up for problems.

Okay, so what does this have to do with marriage? Well, an important part of your prayer every day should be to pray God’s protection over your wife. So, make sure you do that. Before either of you leave the house in the morning, grab her hand and pray for God’s protection and blessing over her.

Even if you only take a minute to pray together, that’s probably better than what you’re doing now. Granted, it would be much better if you could spend some serious prayer time together. But, you know something? If you wait until you can find some serious prayer time that you can have together, you’re probably never going to find time that you can pray together. However, if you start out small, you’ve got the opportunity for growth.

Your wife needs your prayers. The world in which we live is a dangerous one, especially for women. That few minutes of prayer in the morning might be the only thing that keeps your wife safe that day. Would you deny her that? No, not willingly, but you might do so by forgetting to pray.