Our lives are easily filled with busyness and circumstances beyond our control. Often God seems distant and we wonder how to live our lives with a felt sense of God. A Personal Day of Prayer allows us to focus on our spiritual life and to explore various ways to discern God’s presence. Different types of prayer become windows for the soul to connect with God and allow the inner strength and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ to permeate our lives.

Days of Prayer 2025

Christ the Teacher
Facilitated by Paula Mitchell Director of Doorways Ministries 

April 5, 2025 St. Mary’s by the Lake 9:30 am – 3:00 pm

Our lives are easily filled with busyness and circumstances beyond our control. Often God seems distant and we wonder how to live our lives with a felt sense of God. A Personal Day of Prayer allows us to focus on our spiritual life and to explore various ways to discern God’s presence. Different types of prayer become windows for the soul to connect with God and allow the inner strength and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ to permeate our lives.

This day long retreat titled Christ the Teacher is focused on Jesus: how His life is centered on God as the central factor in every situation. How Jesus taught.  Where He taught. What He taught.  We’re reminded in the Gospels that Jesus teaches us where we are, in our own church, in our own city or town, in our own circumstances just as He taught those long ago in the synagogue, on the beach, anywhere and everywhere He encounters people who are open to His teaching.

“Christ teaching in His life and death, in his Scriptures and His Church
and Saints—all different aspects of one action, parts of His economy
and so charged with His life—teaching, but one thing, God and
our total self-giving to God—God who is greater than our heart. 
Once we have learned that lesson all else falls into place.”
– Evelyn Underhill, Light of Christ

Christ the Healer

Facilitated by Paula Mitchell Director of Doorways Ministries 

June 28, 2025 St. Mary’s by the Lake 9:30 am – 3:00 pm

This day‐long retreat entitled Christ the Healer is an opportunity to spend time learning about and experiencing together a sampling of Christ’s healing ministry.

The Gospels are full of examples of Jesus’ physically touching and healing people. Jesus not only touched suffering people who needed healing He also touched struggling people who needed help. We will spend the day reflecting upon several Gospel passages focused on Jesus and the power of His healing touch.

“as we look at Christ…we feel it seems to demand of us two
movements, a movement of prayer and a movement of service.  We all
need in one way or another that which is here poured out of the life
and love of God, and that same light and love require of us, in our turn,
a total self-giving to its purposes.  These two movements of dependence
on Christ and co-operation with Him make together a Christian’s life. 
We can only give what we have received, we only receive in order to give.”
– Evelyn Underhill, Light of Christ

Christ the Rescuer

Facilitated by Paula Mitchell Director of Doorways Ministries 

September 13, 2025 St. Mary’s by the Lake 9:30 am – 3:00 pm

Our lives are easily filled with busyness and circumstances beyond our control. Often God seems distant and we wonder how to live our lives with a felt sense of God. A Personal Day of Prayer allows us to focus on our spiritual life and to explore various ways to discern God’s presence. Different types of prayer become windows for the soul to connect with God and allow the inner strength and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ to permeate our lives.

This day long retreat titled Christ the Rescuer will focus on several Gospel passages where Jesus rescues his disciples.  As we look at these passages, we are reminded of our own need to be rescued and where Jesus is inviting us to trust in the rescuing and supporting action of God in our present circumstances.  William Connolly S.J. reminds us that, “The Christian is often in need of rescue from blind alleys and tributary paths on his journey. Traveling habits that were helpful at an earlier stage later become hindrances, and he needs rescue from them too. Disappointment is a vivid signal that the need for rescue is present.” (1)

“to accept historical Christianity as God’s supreme self-revelation…
means accepting the Gospel story as touching our lives significantly
at every point, because it is conveying God.  If we are ever to learn all this record can mean for us, we must never forget that these, beyond all other facts of history, are indwelt, moulded, brought into being by the living
Spirit of God….  And if we thus feel God within these events, some so
strange and some so homely…then we also accept all these incidents as conveying something of His overruling Will and Thought,
having something in them for each of us.”
– Evelyn Underhill, Light of Christ

(1) William J. Connolly SJ, The Best of the Review Volume 1 (1983), p. 194.