"Are you just going to sit there and stare at your computer?"

 She must have looked at it for ten seconds before addressing me while I waited at the front desk. She wasn't the first person I was agitated with this morning (though I hope she'll be the last). One of the kids interrupted my prayer time this morning because they'd forgotten something they really needed at school and my fragile apple cart was upset. 

I need my prayer time. Besides all the utterances during the day, those short and desperate pleas sprung by impatience or worry, I long for that time in the morning when I get to talk to God about how grateful I am to know Him and how astounded I am at how much more of Him there is to know.

 I desire that daily opportunity to lift my family and loved ones up, requesting safety and health, and above all, a growing relationship with the one who loves them best. Overstuffed pages in spirals and scrawled notecards are full of favored verses and requests I make on behalf of those God has graciously placed in my life.  Much of my daily prayer echoes the one I said the day before. Allow Jason time with just you. Keep Hayden safe. Help Hallie to look to you for her worth.  Help Rylie be content and devoted in the friendships she has. Heal "so and so"...Comfort her...  Encourage him. 

This morning, after my prayer and after running some unexpected errands, I needfully tacked on an important prayer addendum.  In it, I prayed for myself. 

I don't always do that. Scanning my prayer journal, it's not often enough that I see words concerning myself that reach beyond what I'm grateful for. Do I think it's prideful or self-centered to pray for myself? It could be if I were praying for things that would only benefit me, but as I'm reminded this morning, there are a multitude of things I need to be praying for me that will benefit, not only me, but the very people I'm praying for.  Going to God in focused prayer for myself will bless my children. As I pray that God would rid me of the need to be busy, ...as I pray that God would relieve my anxiety, I'll be better able to listen to my children, becoming more aware of how to care for them and how I ought to pray for them. Praying against my imptatience will benefit the interactions I have with ladies who don't help me fast enough at counters. 

I can be a Xena prayer warrior for everybody on the planet and still be miserably lacking when I forget to ask God to help me where I fall short. In scripture we find David, the man after God's own heart, continually pouring out his heart to God concerning his needs. In Psalm 86, though it's only seventeen verses, David uses the words me, my, and I, thirty-one times, not including when he refers to himself as your servant. 

While praying for those we love is something we're supposed to be doing, it's not a litany of intercessory prayers for others that we read in the Psalms.  King David is aware of his own powerlessness to be good and do good on his own.   Chapter after chapter, we read how he goes to God in prayer, asking to be made whole, asking to be made new. 

While we pray for others, like the toddler in a recently viral YouTube video announced, You got to take care of you own self.  

As we devote time in prayer for ourselves, we can trust that God will equip us to be better wives, better mothers, better sisters, better pray-ers.  In praying for own transformation, we recognize and make known our desire that we be fashioned into better daughters of the One True King, our being better daughters brings well-deserved glory to God. 

Hear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. 

Bring joy to your servant, for to you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.

Psalm 86: 1, 4