039: 3 Shifts That Happen When Prayer Becomes Intentional
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Show Notes
What’s the difference between praying throughout your day and sitting down for intentional, focused prayer — and why does it matter?
In this episode, Lauren shares how intentional prayer can connect you to God in a deeper way.
You’ll hear why “praying on the go” isn’t the same as making prayer a priority, and the three internal shifts that begin to happen when prayer becomes intentional. If you’ve been craving more consistency, depth, and clarity in your prayer life — especially as you head into a new year — this episode is for you.
Key Points:
🔑 Why intentional prayer builds a deeper, more relational connection with God
🔑 How dedicated prayer time shapes humility, honor, and surrender
🔑 The difference between multitasking prayer and focused prayer
🔑 Why sitting still and journaling creates space to hear from God more clearly
🔑 How consistency in prayer changes how you show up spiritually — not just how often
🔑 Why good intentions alone don’t create lasting prayer habits
Bible Verses:
📖 “Pray continually.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:17
January Prayer Challenge
Lauren is hosting a free 31-Day Prayer Challenge beginning January 1st.
Each day includes:
🙏 A one-minute prayer from a different prayer leader
🙏 A daily prayer theme
🙏 Printable journal pages with scripture, reflection questions, and prayer transcripts
🙏 Optional deeper connection through email encouragement and a Facebook group
👉 Sign up for free at www.anchoreddecisions.com/prayer2026
📍 Or follow along on Instagram @anchoreddecisions
🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe for more faith-based decision-making tips!
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Transcript
Opening
Why is intentional prayer so important? What do I mean by intentional prayer? And how can we achieve that in 2026? That is what today's episode is all about. So make sure you stay tuned after I give a few little life updates. So for those of you who are my normal followers, you'll notice that I haven't been posting for a while, and I think I've said this the last few episodes I've posted, but it's related to my priorities. And right now I'm still dealing with a bit of my health issues that are exasperated by stress and I've had a lot of client work for my graphic design business, so that's kept me busy and I've been working on things behind the scene for anchored that I really wanna get launched, and I just feel like I don't even have enough time to work on those.
So the podcast just had to be the thing that gets set aside, and I think it's okay to give ourselves grace over these things and to recognize what's the most important, and is it pushing myself and staying up late, waking up extra early in order to produce my podcast every week, or even every other week, or is it putting my faith first, putting my kids above my business, putting my health, because that affects almost every area of my life in front of it. And so, yes, the podcast is the one thing that needed to go, but I do have an important, exciting announcement that I wanted to share. And so I thought I'd do an episode kind of around it.
And that is I am launching my January prayer challenge. I did it last year. It was amazing. God had laid it on my heart really last minute, last year, and he just, it was amazing how it all came together, and I just felt his hand over it the whole time. And this year I was going to skip it. And then I realized, you know what? I have not been as consistent in my prayer life as I want to be.
And sometimes you get in this rhythm of just kind of praying over the same things over and over. And so I'm like, I need this in my life. And so I know that it'll impact others as well. So if you are looking to be more consistent in your prayer life, or pray over all different aspects of your life to start 2026 with a really strong foundation, or if you just want to have a new perspective on prayer and see what other people have to pray about, then please join us.
It is free, and you can sign up at anchoreddecisions.com/prayer2026. We have a different speaker each day that shares around a one minute prayer. And then if you sign up officially since those are posted to Instagram, so if you just wanna follow along and not sign up, it's just follow me @anchoreddecisions on Instagram, but if you want to go deeper and to get the most out of the experience, then I do encourage you to sign up officially and you'll be emailed each day with that day's prayer topic. As well as you'll get the prayer journal pages that are printable, and these will have the a bible verse related to each day's topic.
So every day is a different kind of theme and topic to pray over, and it'll have a reflection question for you as well as the transcript of the prayer. So if you'd rather read it and be able to reflect over it that way, rather than follow along audibly, then that's totally up to you. I know some people said that that's their preference.
So make sure you sign up and you can get the transcript for that. You could print it out and that way every single day when you wake up or right before bed, whenever you do your prayer time, you'll have that right there in front of you. So make sure you sign up. And with that said, let's get into this episode.
Show Intro
Welcome to the Anchored Decision Show. I'm your host, Lauren Black, the world's biggest overthinker turned decision coach, all by the grace of God. Now I'm on a mission to help you make easier decisions, discover God's will, and live with purpose. Tune in weekly to hear real-life decision stories, expert insights, and faith-based strategies to help you navigate your decisions with confidence. So, ditch your pros and cons list and learn to make better decisions without asking your mom or losing another night's sleep. Let's go.
What Do I Mean by “Intentional Prayer”?
All right, so recently I was invited to be a speaker for an online conference, and it was a live thing, so we had people in the chat and I could message with people. So while I was in there, there was a girl that was in my session that was also one of the speakers, and we had chatted a little bit during my session and she had listened to some things I said. I could tell she had listened to mine and then I joined her session. And during her session she shared how You'll never hear her say that she heard this from God or that God called her to do that.
And it made me a little sad to hear that, but then she went on to explain that she doesn't just sit down and have intentional prayer time. She just makes prayer part of her every day as she's walking along and driving and in the shower and things like that. And so I couldn't help but thinking that, is there a reason why she says she doesn't hear from God?
Is it related to the fact that she doesn't sit down with intentional prayer time? And don't get me wrong, I think it's great and actually encouraged and biblically sound to pray throughout our day. Yeah. You know when you are in the shower, when you're driving, when you're going about your business, it is important to be in consistent prayer.
And the Bible even says pray always. But there is something to be said about that intentional prayer time, where you sit down with God and either journal or pray in your head, but it's dedicated time for just prayer. And so that's what I am calling the intentional prayer time of when you're really super focused and that's your only focus.
So we could be driving and say, okay, I'm gonna intentionally pray during my drive. But there will be things that distract us. There could be where we have to focus on, wait, where am I going right now? Or there's traffic, or an e-bike pops out in front of our car and freaks us out, and all of a sudden you're distracted.
You're pulled away from that concentrated prayer, and you're also kind of multitasking. So it's harder to stay super focused and only focus on God when you're driving or when you're doing another activity, when you're cleaning your house. There will be things that distract you. So intentional prayer is when you sit down to spend that one-on-one time with God, with the sole intent of spending time in prayer.
So why, what are some reasons why I feel this is so important?
REASONS INTENTIONAL PRAYER IS IMPORTANT
1. It Develops the Relationship
Number one, it builds the relationship. So just like any relationship, you need communication and to me sitting down in prayer time, especially when you can get out a prayer journal and write your prayers, that to me makes such a big difference in my prayer life.
But that's to me, the difference between having a friendship where you just kind of send some texts and some memes every once in a while, make sure you say happy birthday on their birthday, but you never really take things deep, versus sitting down for coffee or dinner with a friend where you're getting to know their circumstances at the time, you're getting to know their heart, their passions, their emotions.
You can pick up on that because you're spending that quality time focused on just one another and spending that time together. So you, you know, if you've ever gone to a dinner party or a hangout where you see someone that you haven't seen in six months, you don't really know what's going on. It's harder to get to the deep parts of the conversation.
But when you see someone that you know, they were struggling with X, Y, Z, or they were going through a certain thing, or hey, they might be house hunting, and you can sit there and say, Hey, how's the house hunt going? I know you were looking for something in this area. Did you find it? And so the more you know about the person, the more you can make conversation.
You don't have those awkward pauses where you're like, what do I say and what question could I ask them? And what could we talk about? It's the same with our relationship with God, that the more consistent we are with coming to him, the more we're going to know his heart. The more we're going to be able to spill our heart, the more we're going to be able to connect and just develop that strong relationship.
You need that quality time together to really know God and feel known by him. Obviously he knows us inside and out, so it's not, not to for him to know us, but you know, just allow ourselves, our hearts to be vulnerable and open up. And sometimes we get to know ourselves better through things that we might not have realized were even in our life until we sit down and open up to God.
2. It develops a posture of humility, honor, surrender
So number two, it develops a posture of humility, honor, surrender. So while we serve Abba Father, who wants that parent-child relationship that loves you no matter what, you can talk about anything, sometimes those type prayers that are more of the prayers on the go can be more casual conversations. But we have to remember, we also serve Yahweh, the omnipresent, all powerful creator of the universe who sits enthroned above all and is not just loving, but is also just, and he's all powerful.
Like if you read the book of Isaiah at all, you'll know that God loves his people, but he's also the all powerful mighty God that will correct you when you're wrong. That will send judgment and punishment out, and he deserves to be worshiped, honored, revered, feared. There is a different mindset, I think, at least for me, when I sit down and start praying to Yahweh, the almighty creator versus, Hey, Abba Father.
It's just a different posture that's filled with a little more honor and respect, a little more dedicated worship and submission. And so I feel like that can be lacking that honor, that dedication, that submission, that fear when we're just casually going about our prayer life throughout our day and not sitting down in prayer.
3. We’ll hear from God more
So number three is that when we have that intentional prayer time, it allows us to pause and hear from God more. Because if you're just driving or if you're in the shower and you're not focused, it's going to be harder to sit and pause and hear from God. I think for me, sometimes if I'm journaling, I'm writing something, all of a sudden God speaks to me, I can write that down in my journal too. And whether it's a question he's laying on my heart for me to answer that I can then proceed to answer. But there's something about when you're sitting still dedicated to just prayer, that you can open up to hear from him more. I know for me, at least when I am like praying in the shower and I'm just kind of rambling. Just going on and on. And I don't take as much time to pause and reflect and listen and wait, you know, yield to what God has to say to me. And for me personally,
I hear from him the most when I have been consistent in my prayer time and when I've been consistent in journaling my prayers. So that's why I encourage you to have this intentional, dedicated prayer time, so I'm going to leave you at that.
Summary
With those three bullet points of it builds the relationship, it develops that posture of humility, honor and surrender, and it allows you to be able to hear from God more. I know there are way more benefits to intentional prayer but I wanted to keep this short and sweet to just pinpoint the main reasons that I feel intentional prayer is super important.
Join the Prayer Challenge
And once again, wanted to invite you to join me for my anchored in prayer, 31 Day Prayer challenge that starts January 1st. But if you sign up now, you'll start getting the emails of encouragement and tips for prayer.
You can join the Facebook group where I'll be going live, even before we start the January 1st prayer challenge to help you create a habit of prayer. To help you figure out how can you rearrange your schedule to make prayer a priority. What do you need to do to start journaling or sitting down with that intentional prayer time and so that you can set the foundation for your year so you can set that habit.
You know, it takes more than just intentions to create a habit. It takes rearranging your schedule and your lifestyle and really making it that priority and part of your schedule rather than just trying to fit it in when you can. Because I think that helps you be intentional too, that if you want that dedicated prayer time, you can't just let it be something that you get to when you get to or you'll never get to it.
So join us for free at anchoreddecisions.com/prayer2026 and go follow me on Instagram so you won't miss any updates there. And that's where I'll be posting all of the daily prayers from all the different prayer leaders. So that is at anchored decisions on Instagram.
Help Spread the Word
So if this resonated with you and you feel like being a part of spreading the word about this prayer challenge, would you do me a favor and just share this with a friend? Either this episode or share the prayer challenge with a friend? Having accountability is another great way to be intentional and to keep the consistency. So do the prayer challenge with a friend and, you know, encourage one another and support one another in that.
So that's it for today. I thank you for being a loyal listener, that even when I'm not consistent in my podcast, you still show up and tune in.
Outro
I pray that this episode was encouraging to you, to help you to sit down with intentional prayer time with God, so that you can grow closer to him, develop that relationship, be able to hear him more clearly and just revere him for the amazing God that he is.
Have a blessed week.
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