Do you often have people ask you to pray for them, or for a specific intention?
It happens to me every week, and I try to pray right then and there, a short prayer, so that I can be sure to fulfill my promise to them that I will pray.
But recently I stumbled upon a better way to pray for people’s requests, as well as my own intentions, and that is by always having at least one novena that I praying at any given time.
Using the Pray Catholic Novena app, you can start a novena and type in the prayer intention or intentions in the box, and over days of the novena, each day you are praying for those intentions.
In the middle of novena, if someone asks you to pray for them, you can add that intention to the existing ones in your novena.
Once you reach the end of that novena, simply copy the text of all your intentions, and then start a new novena, could be the same one, could be a different one, and paste in your intentions from the previous novena, removing any that have been answered.
Remember also, that God always answers our prayer, but often the answer is No, or is not what we wanted. He brings good out of all things, however evil they may be or appear to us.
Chaining Together Novenas
I call this “chaining novenas” together, not of course, in a superstitious chain letter, but more in the meaning of daisy chaining together systems, only this is a system of prayer.
In the Pray app, each novena you complete is saved in your Profile history, and you can open up each one and remember which intentions were prayed for. It works as a simple prayer journal.
You could even append on to the intentions once you complete the novena, the status of any of them that were answered one way or another.
I used to pray novenas only occasionally, perhaps a handful of times each year, but since I can see the backend of the novena app, I would notice that people would pray hundreds and even thousands of novenas, which meant that they were actually praying multiple novenas and praying novenas at all times!
Of course, I never try to look into what their intentions are for those novenas, but their actions of continual prayer encouraged me to start doing the same.
So the next time that someone asks you to pray for them, certainly pray right then and there, but also use the novena app and add their intention to your current novena, and carry it through to the next one until the intention is resolved.
Happy praying!
