HELP! There are voices in my head! One is encouraging me to better myself with challenges while the other focuses on my failures. From a third party perspective, it's easy to pick the encouraging one. If only it was that simple.
The voice I hear that encourages me tells me to get to work, get some exercise, help others out, and get things done as they come up. This is the voice of God. He wants the best for me. The more I listen to this voice, the happier I am. So what about the other voice?
The other voice says things like, I'll do it tomorrow, that person doesn't need my help, asking for help means I'm dumb, I'm not meant to be great, I'll probably just fail again, I should just watch TV to forget about my problems, and many more. It's crazy to think that anyone would ever choose this...but it seems we choose it a lot. This voice leads us down a path of hating ourselves...God doesn't want that! He loves us and wants us to love ourselves!
Love is so important that Christ said the greatest commandments are to love God with all your mind and soul and to love one another. Loving someone is doing what is best for them, and that includes loving yourself. This Christianity stuff isn't complicated, it's simply choosing what is best for your soul. God wants you to be great, do you?
The Catholic Church has 2000 years of history. That means 2000 years of discovery and insight people have shared about growing closer to Christ. Many holy men and women have shared things that have worked for them to grow closer to Christ. Whether saying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, a Rosary, singing, reading Scripture, personal prayer, fasting, journaling, abstaining from meat, etc, all of these have helped people grow closer to Christ. We have a lot of different instruments to build our relationship with Christ. The struggle some people have is realizing that you don't have to be fluent at every instrument.
A musician picks up one instrument at a time. Some can play multiple instruments, but they typically didn't learn them at the same time. And once they learned one instrument, it was easier to pick up another. Same can be said for Catholicism. You're not going to know or understand every form of prayer. These have been developed and expanded over our 2000 year history. We have the luxury of picking one we want to work on. So if you enjoy reading, you may want to pray through reading scripture or a spiritual book. If you enjoy exercising, you can focus on your physical struggle and push harder like Christ is calling us to push harder in our everyday lives.
What if you can't focus on a prayer and just need something to carry you through? The Chaplet of Divine Mercy and the Rosary are great for that. I have said them many times while cleaning my room. Yes, I've done things during prayer. The Rosary is honoring our spiritual mother, and cleaning my room honors my earthly mother #Twofer.
Try a few different forms of prayer. When one works, have that be your base prayer. Then, from time to time, add a few different forms of prayer to see if they can help you deepen your relationship with Christ.
