Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Well, it's a Monday, and I want to open and close this week of shows by doing something we did as a family.

Not long ago in a prayer time we had

that was more powerful and meaningful than I even expected. I'm going to talk more about it in a minute,

but let me just say I believe it should always be the focus of our prayers and is honestly

the very best way I can think of to start off this and every week and every day for that matter.

Our family doesn't pray together as often as I would like. One of my sons is now away at

college and all of us aren't together as much. We've gone through seasons where we prayed more as a family and

sometimes less, sometimes quicker prayers, and sometimes longer and in depth. But there's one prayer

time we had a few years ago that really sticks out in my mind. I'd been feeling like we were in

sort of a praying rut as a family. Like we were just kind of phoning it in, you know, going through

the motions of getting together and praying, maybe even just quick prayers over the dinner table.

And I was noticing that we were also doing a lot of asking God for things in our prayers.

So one night when we got together in the living room, I said, so tonight we're going to do this a little

different. We're going to pray, but we aren't going to ask God for anything. We're just going to

praise and thank him for who he is and for specific things about him, his attributes, just things

we love about him and are grateful for. So we all kind of settled into this

idea for a minute. And honestly, I wasn't sure how it would go. I didn't have anything planned

out. And I thought it might just be one of those quick prayer nights or maybe even kind of a flop,

if I'm being honest, because we're just so used to asking him for things, even good things, even on behalf of

others that just praising him and thanking him might be a real stretch.

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