Learning How to Live Without Stress in my (Prayer) Life

Hello, everyone! Today I'm linking up with the beautiful ladies of Tuesday Talk, and I'd like to discuss how I am a recovering Control Freak, and I now to achieve stress-free living. Okay, not really, but kind of. See, stress is super lame. Stress makes me exhausted, cranky, crazy, worried, anxious, overwhelmed, and a bunch of other things that health professionals have probably laid out nicely in a list. You can look all over the internet for self-help articles that deal with stress-free living, but I'm not going to head that route. Instead, I want to talk about living stress-free in connection with another area. See, there's another source of stress that people really don't talk about much: prayer. 


I know, I know, you may be thinking, 

"Now, this is just plain silly. Prayer is NOT something to be stressed about!" 

It's true that prayer shouldn't be a source of stress. But, in my life, prayer can quickly turn into a stress-inducing crazy jumble of bleh. There have been numerous times in my life where the following situation takes place: Control Freak AnneMarie is Praying Lots, But All This Prayer is Making Her More Stressed. It's a thing, guys. Like I said earlier, though, stress is something that I try to avoid if at all possible. So, I've steadily been working to make sure that prayer no longer is a source of stress in my life. I'm not all the way there, but I've made definite progress over the past few years. 

For example, several weeks ago, I posted a prayer intention to a Facebook group that I'm in. One of the people commented, saying 

I'm praying, I know how worried you are about this! 

I didn't want to seem like a callous, heartless person, and I felt bad that other people who had no personal connection to my prayer intention were worried about it, so I just responded with a 

Thanks for the prayers! 

In all honesty, though, I wasn't worried and stressed about it. Nope, not an ounce of worry or stress. I really cared about the prayer intention, and it laid (and still lies) close to my heart. Yet, no stress-I was like, whatever, God's got this under control. Trust me, I haven't always been this way. Far from it, in fact! Like I said, I am a recovering Control Freak. So, if you want to read about how I have been trying to overcome stress in my prayer life, and how my prayer life caused stress in the first place, I'm over at Catholic365.com talking about "Striving for Stress-Free Prayer." 

Hint: Learning to live without stressful prayer may have something
to do with this quotation...