It was one of those times where our marriage was in a rut.

We couldn’t place our finger on one particular thing that was bringing us down.  It was more a culmination of things that lead to us feeling that our marriage wasn’t working.

We had already been through marriage counseling in the past so we were able to recognize that we needed help.  We knew it was something that we couldn’t tackle alone and so we scheduled a meeting with one of the leaders from our church.

While I knew that would help, I also knew that we needed to do something MORE, on our own.

I knew that we needed to pray.

But not how we’ve prayed in the past.

We were pretty decent at praying things when we knew we needed them.  But, one thing that we were not decent at? Praying together.

In fact, I think we had only prayed together a handful of times and most of those were at church retreat or functions.

To actually pray together at our home was something that we had never been comfortable with.

Typical Jeff Rose big idea.

If you’ve been a reader of ours for any amount time, then you already know that I’m the “big idea” guy. In fact, my wife makes fun of me all the time.

In this particular case, my big idea was for the both of us to do a 30-day prayer challenge where we would pray together (not separate) for the entire month.

As I mentioned before, this is something that was totally new to us, but also something that I knew we absolutely needed.

The initial 30-day prayer challenge did not start off without any hitches.  In fact, we fought the first two nights that we attempted to do the challenge.

You might be wondering why in the world we would fight over praying together.  You would think that praying together would be a time of coming together.

Basically in those first two nights, many underlying issues going on in our marriage that we hadn’t talked about were revealed to us.  Love, emotions, and a lot of hurt feelings had been bottled up, and finally came out those first few nights.

Even though we fought, a lot of good things were uncovered and definitely gave us good material to pray over over the next 30 days.

You can hear more about our 30-day prayer challenge on our podcast here:

It’s Your Turn

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

At the conclusion of the 30-day prayer challenge, we had a closeness in our marriage like never before.

Yes, it was uncomfortable at first. Yes, it was scary. Yes, it took effort.

But there are so many good things that we were able to identify about each other and also within ourselves that never would have happened unless we had taken the time to pray with each other.

Because of the success that we had with that 30-day prayer challenge, we want to encourage YOU, the Marriage More community, to also do a prayer challenge with your spouse.

How Will It Work

It will be 22 days of praying TOGETHER.

It doesn’t have to be anything formal. Most of the time when we pray together it’s standing in our bedroom. Sometimes the prayers are short, sometimes they are long, sometimes we pray over each other and sometimes we pray about other things like kids, work, stress, and friends. And sometimes, we just pray together to thank Jesus for all He is doing in our lives.

To hear us pray together (yes, we actually recorded it so you could listen) listen to episode #30.

If praying together makes you uncomfortable or scared then be sure to check out our blog post on How To Pray Together where we break it down into actionable steps to help you get there.

**If you are not on our email list and would like to download The Prayer Challenge PDF you can do so HERE.