You have probably tried to pray together before, at a wedding shower, a new year, or a season when everything seemed to be going well, and somewhere in the middle of the effort the awkwardness crept in, one of you found the words more easily than the other, and the shared quiet time slowly became a personal quiet time again. If that is your story, you are in the company of more married couples than you realize, because praying aloud together is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines a couple can build, and the difficulty has everything to do with the vulnerability that spoken prayer requires. This book is a collection of 101 fully written prayers you can read aloud together, take turns speaking, and make your own.
Each prayer opens with a passage of Scripture, followed by the guided prayer itself written in the first person plural so that both of you speak the same words, followed by a brief reflection prompt you can discuss, journal, or simply sit with in silence. Every entry takes between 5 and 10 minutes, which means you can build this habit on a coffee break, before the children wake up, or in the last minutes before sleep. The 101 prayers are arranged in 16 chapters that follow the seasons of marriage.
Inside, you will discover the prayers that break through the awkwardness of the first shared prayers, prayers for unity, communication, forgiveness, and the fresh start after a fight, prayers for finances, parenting, in-laws, and the extended family, prayers for intimacy, the hard seasons, grief, health, and strength, prayers for work, decisions, spiritual growth, protection, and legacy, and the Graduated Prayer Ladder that turns printed prayers into your own words.
Neither of you has to be more spiritually mature than the other, because the words are already on the page. The only rule that matters is that you actually say the words together, because the power is not in reading the page and it is in speaking the prayer.
