{"id":3254,"date":"2016-09-21T07:44:54","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T14:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/?p=3254"},"modified":"2016-10-05T17:12:43","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T00:12:43","slug":"stylish-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/stylish-prayer","title":{"rendered":"Stylish Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sunset\"Some people are naturally stylish<\/a>. Their clothes, their hair–their entire manner–exude\u00a0style<\/em>, a magical word that blends elegance, originality, and visual appeal. While I am most certainly not stylish, I appreciate my stylish family and friends. Whenever I try to be stylish, either in my appearance or in my writing, I come off artificial, stilted, and phony.<\/p>\n

The same thing happens when I try to be stylish in prayer. Oh, I don’t intentionally try to be stylish, but that’s what it is when I’m not myself in prayer, when I try to imitate someone else’s prayer style. My prayer ends up artificial, stilted, and phony.<\/p>\n

It’s at those times that I need reminding that all God asks of us is to be ourselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.\u00a0The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, \u2018O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity\u2014greedy, dishonest, adulterous\u2014or even like this tax collector. I\u00a0fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.\u2019\u00a0But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, \u2018O God, be merciful to me a sinner.\u2019\u00a0I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.\u201d<\/em> — Luke 18:10-14<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some people are naturally stylish. Their clothes, their hair–their entire manner–exude\u00a0style, a magical word that blends elegance, originality, and visual appeal. While I am most certainly not stylish, I appreciate my stylish family and friends. Whenever I try to be stylish, either in my appearance or in my writing, I come off artificial, stilted, and phony. The same thing happens when I try to be stylish in prayer. Oh, I don’t intentionally try to be stylish, but that’s what it is when I’m not myself in prayer, when...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,17],"tags":[152,664],"class_list":["post-3254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spirituality","category-writing","tag-prayer-2","tag-the-daily-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/sunset-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOucj-Qu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3254"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3379,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3254\/revisions\/3379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicksenger.com\/onecatholiclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}