Guide 5: Evening Prayer
A Prayer Shaped Life, 2025
Review the practice so far (10 min)
In this series, we are focusing on the practice of Prayer—the slow-growing, sweet-tasting fruit of communion with God over the long haul. In the last Guide, we agreed on our exercise for the week ahead: Silent Prayer. So let’s talk about how that went!
What did you experience as you made space for midday prayer this last week?
As you’ve been leaning into the practice of Prayer these last few weeks, have you noticed any small shifts in your heart, habits, or attention?
Guide overview (2 min)
As we’ve explored for the last two weeks, so much is competing for our attention, which is one of the most significant resources we can steward. If we’re not careful, this bombardment of noise can overtake us like a flood, sweeping away our time, energy, and attention in its fast-moving current. This attempt to distract us and pull apart our focus is an age-old problem. And, for millennia, God’s people combatted it by ordering their days by communion with God, stopping at multiple times each day to pray.
Following in this tradition, Bridgetown’s Daily Prayer Rhythm aims at building a habit of communing with God in the normal parts of our lives, so that we can grow in intimacy with him and participate in his coming Kingdom in and around us. We stop to pray with intention and specificity three times a day: praying Scripture in the morning, praying compassion at midday, and praying the Examen in the evening. Over the last two weeks we explored morning and midday prayer; and tonight we conclude the series with evening prayer.
Exercise for tonight (30 min)
For tonight, we’ll engage in the practice of Prayer through the exercise of praying the Examen. Each evening, we have the opportunity to either forget our day or remember our day—choosing activities that help us escape the day we just lived or to reflect with the intention of finding God in the day. While there are many tools that can help us learn to hear God’s voice and notice his presence in our daily lives, one of the most helpful is praying the Examen—a form of prayer in which we take time with God to look back over our day, paying special attention to where we noticed or missed God’s presence. Doing this reflection over time helps train our attention to find God in our ordinary days. We begin to more easily recognize what God is up to in and around us, helping us to keep in step with the Spirit.
There are four steps to the Examen: Review, Resonate, Repent, and Request. We’ll walk through each step silently together, reflecting together at the end about how it went and where we noticed God. As we begin, let’s take a moment to get comfortable, and then I’ll guide us through the four prompts, giving us space between each to silently interact with God. If it’s helpful, feel free to journal your conversation with God as we go.
Review: Holy Spirit, as we turn our attention now to the day we just lived, we ask for your help to guide us back through it. Before we assign meaning or jump ahead to the next step: from the moment we woke up to the moment we started this prayer, what happened today? What did we do? What did we feel? Where did we go? Who did we see? What did we get done? What was left undone for another day? What did we say? What victories did we experience? Where did we feel loss? We take time now to review our day with you.
(Leader note: Throughout this exercise, take care to leave a brief pause between each question. Give people 3–4 minutes in silence to Review their day. Consider playing instrumental music during this time to help people focus.)
Resonate: Now, Holy Spirit, help us comb back through our day with special attention to your presence. Where did we feel near to you? What in our day “resonated” with your closeness? Whether it was something I saw, said, felt, did, or received, or someone I interacted with, where did I feel you draw near to me? We take a moment to thank you for where we felt near to you,
(Leader note: Give people 3–4 minutes in silence to notice the resonance of his presence in their day.)
Repent: Next, Holy Spirit, help us go back through our day with special attention to where we missed or ignored your presence. We take a moment to explore with you the moments we felt far from you—Where might we have strayed? Where might we have missed you?—and then to repent, confessing those moments to you and receiving your forgiveness.
(Leader note: Give people 3–4 minutes in silence to notice where they strayed and to repent.)
Request: Finally, Holy Spirit, with our review of today in mind, we turn our attention to tomorrow: What is one simple thing we would ask of you for tomorrow in light of our reflection about today? We take a moment now to request something from you.
(Leader note: Give people 1 minute to ask God for tomorrow. Then close in prayer, thanking God for speaking and asking him to continue to make you all aware of his presence.)
Reflect & Plan. The exercise for the week ahead is to pray the Examen each evening. With that in mind, we’re going to get into smaller groups and spend 10 minutes reflecting and planning with two prompts:
What was it like for you to pray the Examen tonight?
How and when could you pray the Examen each evening this week?
(Leader note: Let people get into smaller groups to discuss. Afterwards, call everyone together to read the exercise for the week ahead.)
Exercise for the week ahead (3 min)
Tonight we explored the evening prayer portion of Bridgetown’s Daily Prayer Rhythm. For the week ahead, we are all going to continue practicing praying the Examen on our own:
Evening prayer: This week, we’re all going to end each day by praying the Examen, walking through the framework we used tonight—Review, Resonate, Repent, & Request. Also, the evening prayer section of the Lectio365 app is a helpful, free resource that will guide you in the practice of praying the Examen. And, consider continuing your morning prayer rhythm of praying Scripture and your midday prayer rhythm of praying compassion each day as well.
