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I am willing to bet there are more than a few of you who, like me, have difficulty in your prayer life. My issue is my mind seems to wander a mile a minute and I will start to pray for my family and end up thinking about string theory (physics) or stuff I need to do for work the next day, or what have you. Lack of focus is a real problem.

I was wandering around the internet and ran into something very curious, It was a set of Protestant Prayer Beads, otherwise known as an Anglican Rosary, and actually if you search it out it seems almost every Protestant denomination lays some kind of claim. What it is in essence is a Rosary like set of beads, smaller and configured differently than a Catholic Rosary. It seemed to me to be the perfdect tactile tool to help people like me, who need focus, in their prayer life. I set out to research it.

Although from a Christian perspective you may be most familiar with a Catholic Rosary, prayer beads have been used in almost every religion since the dawn of time it seems. The references are endless. None the less, apparently in the 1980s someone had the brilliant idea to Protestantize a set. I know what you are thinking here, in Matthew 6:7 the Bible warns against babbling prayers in meaningless repetition. There is also the concern about idol/saint/Mary worship, subjects that distance Protestants from Catholics and their Rosaries. Well, that is the real beauty of the Protestant prayer beads. There is no definitive format.

If you do some reading you are going to find a hundred different sites in the internet with a hundred different suggestions on how to use the Protestant Prayer Beads to aid in your prayer life. Most of them suggest a repetitive prayer format, albeit different prayers. Some of them, like myself, are going to suggest something different. First is the “Invitatory” bead. I use this for sort of gearing my self up. An invocation prayer. As you can see by the illustration the rest of the beads are broken up into segments with bigger beads. Those 4 bigger beads in the circle are called “Cruciform” beads and on each one of those I pray the “Our Father”, or rather some personal incantation of that remembering that prayer is meant for worshiping and thanking God. The smaller beads in the chain are the “Weeks” and on each week bead I pray for a person or people that I have been burdened to pray for. This may sound like quite a lot, but seems to roll through pretty quickly.

The end result here is this device has helped me hold my concentration and focus during prayer. It helped me spend a definitive amount of time talking to God and I felt more fulfilled and better about that than I have in a long time so much so that I wanted to make sure I shared it with you all. I hope it helps you like it did me. A slight side note here is that these are available for purchase from various places on the net but it literally took me less than $10 and 20 minutes to make my own. This would be a fantastic and fun project for not only you to help bring you closer to God, but also for your family, friends and children. Try it and let me know what you think!