I am weeks away from my due date for our third child, and I am in full-out nesting mode! Combine the desire for nesting with the desire to turn the house we bought 8 months ago into a home, and you’ve got a woman on a mission!

In my recent post on dotMagis, I wrote about the impact that making our house a home and creating space for the new baby has on my prayer life. Taking the time to pay attention to the external environment of my life helped me return to my inner stillness and quiet in a very profound way.

This awareness comes as no surprise to me, but more as an affirmation of the importance of space and place when it comes to our prayer lives. Often, as I listen to people during spiritual direction speak about their prayer lives, I ask them to tell me about their space and place of prayer:

Where do you pray?
What does your prayer space look like?
What materials help you in your prayer life?
When do you pray?

The answers to these questions can help us check in on the health of our prayer lives. We may find that the place or the space we initially carved out for prayer is no longer working for us. Maybe there are distractions within our spaces and places of prayer that did not initially exist. Maybe an external event in our lives impacted the time we carved out for prayer, and we need to tweak when we set aside time to be fully present to God. Perhaps the materials we are using as a guide have exhausted themselves, and God is inviting us to a new way of being with God.

I invite you to take a minute to inventory your prayer life and your space and place for prayer!

Becky Eldredge

Becky is an Ignatian-trained spiritual director, retreat facilitator, and writer. She is the author of the Busy Lives and Restless Souls (March 2017, Loyola Press) and The Inner Chapel (April 2020, Loyola Press). She helps others create space to connect faith and everyday life through facilitating retreats and days of reflection, through writing, and through spiritual direction. With nearly twenty years of ministry experience within the Catholic Church, Becky seeks to help others discover God at work in the every day moments of people’s lives by utilizing St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises and the many gifts that our Catholic faith and Ignatian Spirituality provide.