Chapter XII: Of Prayer During the Day

BESIDES the times of temptation, if at other times you feel devout, and God stirs up in your heart a desire to pray, you need not feel afraid to give way to it. If you could think of God the greater part of your time, there is no harm, but the greatest blessing and the greatest joy in so doing.

If you can think a good thought, or wish a good wish, in the midst of your cooking or working or house-cleaning or factory-work, be thankful to God for the favor, and make the most of it. It is certainly far better to remember God and eternal things than to be whirled about with a continual excitement in regard to matters of no consequence, and to be forgetful of Him, as some are, from morning till night, from day to day, from week to week, until they almost forget they are Christians.

No: do you go on a different principle; deepen and strengthen good thoughts on all occasions. Let the life of our Lord Jesus Christ here on earth be ever before you. Love to dwell on the particulars of His actions, as they are written down in the Scriptures.

If your work comes hard, remember how He carried a heavy cross all the way up Mount Calvary. If any one speaks evil of you, see Him hanging on His cross, and the rabble underneath calling Him every vile name they could think of. If tired and weary, think how He, after a long, weary travel, had no place where He could lay His head.

Go over His blessed, humble, charitable conversations and discourses, that you may always be learning something new, for your own increase in goodness and in the love of God.

Sometimes it may nourish your soul to think of our Blessed Lady. Imagine her as she goes about the house, always ready to do everything that duty requires of her, always so quiet and peaceable, always taking such delight in doing everything that could please her Maker, and in doing it in the most perfect manner; always so sweet and obliging to all her fellow-creatures. She is, indeed, in a special way an example to you, for it was in doing very much the same things that are required of you that she made herself so dear to God.

Be sure to take advantage of all the usual opportunities of calling God to mind. For example, do not sit down to eat without blessing the food, and do not rise up without giving thanks for it. Our meals in this way become a sort of station or stopping place, to recall to our minds what we are striving never to forget or lose sight of. They are very proper and suitable stations, too, since we should get ourselves in the habit of thanking God for all His mercies, and all the means of sustaining this life, which is given for gaining eternal life hereafter.