What I've Been Doing With My Rosaries Lately

If you’ve been reading for a while, you might be aware that the Rosary isn’t my favorite devotion. (Be Warned: That was before I learned about the wonders of Pixabay and public domain images.) At the same time, I have a LOT of rosaries, and I feel guilty not using any of them.

My husband and I recently took up the practice of couple prayer, and I noticed something in the process of listening to myself pray out loud.

It sounded - to me - like I was mostly coming with my request lists - for the first few days at least. When I mentioned this to Daniel, just an observation for what we both seemed to mostly be doing (at least a little), he didn’t seem to fully agree, but he did acknowledge that we both seemed to come with more requests than anything else.

It took relatively little time for a solution to come to me. Depending on who you ask, there are four basic types of prayer:

• Adoration - praising God for who he is, and for his characteristics.
• Confession - of your sins. (I look at this as a kind of examination of Conscience, in spots.)
• Thanksgiving - thanking God for the blessings he’s bestowed on me in my life.
• Supplication - Asking for my needs / wants or those of people I love.

I take each of these and assign them to a decade. I usually do them in this order:
Thanksgiving, Confession, Adoration, and Supplication, I find it’s easier to start with Thanksgiving than Adoration, and I thought things flowed nicely in this order from there.

You can do them in whatever order you like, but I found this order to be good.

But what about that extra decade? I’ve been mostly doing two decades of supplication - one for myself and people close to me, and one for those further away.

After these, I use the last five beads (the ones you usually begin praying on), and pray for God to change things that I don’t see any way that my action can affect. Things like the conversion of a friend I no longer see, or for the fall of ISIS. Those sorts of things that while there may be a way that I can act on it, I can no longer see it.



Since I started doing this, I like the changes I’ve seen in my prayer life. Some of them I can’t quite put into pretty words yet, but one I can: I’ve been better about asking forgiveness - from God - for my sins in my every day prayers (though I do still need to go to confession), and I think that’s a pretty good fruit to be starting with.

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* Original Image above taken from Pixabay.