A consistent prayer life is a tough discipline to maintain. If you’re like me, it’s easy to pray earnestly for a day or two, then move to shorter prayers just to get through it, then go days without speaking to God for more than a moment. For people like us, the Prayer Mate app can be a huge help in establishing a deep, consistent prayer life.
The basics
Prayer Mate (iOS, Android) is essentially a digital prayer journal that’s free to download and use. It allows you to create groups of items you want to pray for along with notes and images for each specific item. The steps for creating lists are impressively simple:
Step 1: Create your list, such as “My Walk With God”
Step 2: Add items in that list, moving them around if you’d like (or you can quickly add names from your contacts!)
Step 3: Add notes and photos of anything specific you’d like to remember when that prayer comes up.
And that’s it! The app requires a little effort at first as you add your items, but after that it maintains itself very well. All you need to do in the future is add names as you hear new prayer requests, change notes as prayers are added or answered, and tailor the app to suit your needs.
Customization options
Photos and notes are great, but the app lets you do so much more. After a week or two of use, you’ll start to acquire quite the list of prayers. Yet sometimes, we can’t go through 50+ items while still making our prayer time meaningful. This is where Prayer Mate helps me stay disciplined not only in reminding me to pray regularly but making sure I don’t get burnt out by helping me naturally pray through what’s the highest priority without letting anything get pushed aside.
Reminders
The app lets you set reminders to do your prayer time. The feature is a bit basic, not allowing you to customize days or locations. In that way, your phone’s native alarm or reminder app may be better suited to the task. The benefit to the app reminding you is that the reminder will stay on your phone like any app’s reminder, rather than going off at an inopportune time (like during church or a doctor visit).
Prioritize Lists
Time is always a factor in our lives, but sometimes we want to make sure we pray for specific things every day. Prayer Mate lets you select which lists you pray for every day and how many items from that list you go through each day.
Increase the number of items each day
If you aren’t accustomed to daily prayer, you can start small. Pray for your relationship with God, 1 or 2 family members, a pastor, a church member, and a friend who needs Christ. When you click the “Pray” button, you have the option of praying for any number of items that day. On top of that, items from a list won’t come up again until all items in that list have been prayed for, allowing you to bring everything before God that you want to bring before Him.
Enable Privacy
Often, prayer requests are made with a level of trust. None of us want to risk a friend’s private struggle being made public. Fortunately, the app features the option of requiring a passcode to use!
So many more features
I like Prayer Mate for its simplicity. However, you can check out their website for a whole host of features to help users deepen their time spent alone with God!
A cautionary tale for users
In our connected world, I’ve grown accustomed to my information being stored on servers. So when I wiped my old phone and began my new one, I didn’t consider checking Prayer Mate to see if my information needed to be manually moved to the new one.
It did.
Through no fault of the app, I lost years of prayer requests when I switched phones. Now for those of you can now learn from my mistake, Prayer Mate can use Dropbox to back up your data automatically. Just go to the settings to set it up!
A must-try for Christians
Over and over, God has used Prayer Mate to deepen my walk with Him. It has so many simple benefits that I need and many more options for other believers. So why should you add this to your phone?
- It’s easily accessible, both for prayer time and recording prayers
- It keeps you focused by having individual cards for each prayer instead of staring down a daunting list of items
- You can customize it to suit your own habits, strengths, and struggles when it comes to prayer
You can check out Prayer Mate on iOS, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store.
If you find this app useful, consider supporting the creators who make this marvelous app available for free. Check the app’s setting for details on how to support them. Also, be sure to share the app with your friends so they can deepen their prayer life as well.
With every prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit, and to this end be alert, with all perseverance and requests for all the saints. (Ephesians 6:18)
If you decide to give the app a try, let us know in the comments or on social media! We love hearing when our suggestions help fellow believers in their walk with Christ!
