Starting was the easy part. I took it slow at first, mostly focussing on Morning Prayer, and keeping things short and simple. I would try to do Evening Prayer, but some days it just didn’t happen. I didn’t sweat it. I wanted to ease into it, like you would any new regimen for which you were untrained and unsure.

Eventually, it became a consistent habit. I was happy with it, and it made a big difference in my life. It moved from being interesting but a little tedious to just becoming a part of my day, like brushing and flossing. Conditions were never ideal: I had to do it in the living room with my husband only a few feet away at his computer. I had positioned an icon of the Mandylion and seasonally changing decorations over the TV, which helped, but I really wanted somewhere a bit more private. Still, this was what I got, and it wasn’t bad. At a certain point, having integrated some shamanic soul-clearing exercises that a friend had given me into the practice, I even had several mystical experiences. All of it came to a very postmodern Millennial head when I started doing “Twitter Compline,” celebrating my Evening Prayer in public on Twitter. I had several friends consistently join me for a few months before it came back to mostly just me. It didn’t matter. It was a part of my day.

All of it changed when my father died.

He died with absolutely no warning to the rest of us, although he had been told by his physician that he needed to start taking cholesterol medication and he had not followed that advice. On a Wednesday morning last April he had a massive heart attack and was killed almost instantly.

I kept celebrating Twitter Compline for a while, and eventually, I just stopped. I found that I didn’t have the energy to keep it up as I had. I wasn’t exactly angry at God, but it took everything I had to keep up with everything else going on in my life, which included graduating with my master’s and being sent to the annual event called ACPO to consult with others over whether I could be ordained a priest. It would have been an incredibly emotional time without all of the extra theatrics, so I lost hold of things.

In September I began an internship in a large pseudo-suburban parish, and I was of course strongly encouraged to take up the habit again. It was difficult at first. I have never been a morning person and had to get up fairly early to get to the parish on time. Getting up even earlier to celebrate Morning Prayer seemed impossible. Finally, though, I re-gained my hold, and interestingly enough I’m right back where I started: Morning Prayer six days a week (I don’t do it Sundays) and Evening Prayer when I remember.

I’m taking the Daily Office Challenge to regain the custom I had been managing before my 2014 exploded. It is not only to thank God for holding me up through this most dramatic period of my life, but also to rediscover a piece of myself that I lost touch with.

It is so easy in this busy world to lose sight of why we are doing the things we are doing. I hope and pray that all of those who are walking this path with me find or craft a piece of themselves that will help them remember that they are all part of God’s beautiful and blessed creation.