Working with MyPrayers Review mode for iPad

People often experience difficulties with prayer. Concentration, cliches, repetitiveness, sameness, even what to pray about. MyPrayers was designed to assist us to overcome these things. A big part of that is the Prayer Review process.

About Prayer Review mode

The purpose of Prayer Review in MyPrayers is obviously to review what you have allocated to a particular Prayer, but it’s more than that. It enables you to think about what you want to pray about before you begin talking to our holy God. With this approach, our prayers become meaningful, less full of fluff and repetition, and probably less self-centred. MyPrayers doesn’t dictate this, but enables it. You’ll see what I mean as we go through this tutorial.

What we hope to cover

I want to walk you through the Prayer Review area to show what it does and how it works using the Morning Prayer set up in the Organiser. Once you become familiar with this, you should quickly be able to make good use of MyPrayers.

We shall:

• Get an overview of the Prayer Review area
• Look at what is on each page and how each of the elements work and what to do with them
• Ensure that we think about how you should approach the review process as we go through
• Look at the final (Summary) page and what can be done on that page.

Let’s proceed!

The Home page

When first opening MyPrayers

When you first get MyPrayers and tap on the MyPrayer icon, it will open on the Home page

This page contains all the Prayers I have set up. You will notice that I have added Special and Meditation Prayers to the default list. You can also add your own Prayers extra Prayers (see the Setting up tutorial).

Accessing the Home page from the Organiser

If you are in the Organiser (the file icon at the bottom right will be blue): Tap on the grey house icon bottom left of the screen. That’s the Home button.

If you closed MyPrayers while in the Organiser, when you open the app again it will open on the screen that you last had open. 

Tip

Unless you intend coming back to a particular page in the Organiser, it is a good idea to always revert MyPrayers to the Home page before closing. This is so that when you receive your Prayer alert, you can go straight to the Home page and with one tap begin your Prayer Review.

So, it’s quite simple: each time you close the app, remember to just tap the Home (house) icon so it’s blue.

The Home page is the place to launch into Prayer Review.

The Prayer Review is made up of a series of pages. Each page is one of the Categories (containing its Items and Notes) that you set to appear in the particular Prayer you have opened. 

We are going to use the Morning Prayer as an example. So, tap on the Morning cell.

Once you have tapped on a particular Prayer (in our case, Morning), you have entered Prayer Review mode where you review your prayers!

MyPrayers will open the first of the Prayer Review pages, each of which has the title of your Categories. My first page is the Category, Praise.

You can tell that it’s a Review page as it sits over the top of the Home page. If you hold and pull down from the top of the Review page (where it has the title Praise), you will see that this is so.

Navigation

In Prayer Review mode, you can quickly navigate to each page (or, Category) you have included in this Prayer.

Tap on Next > (top right).

You can go back, by tapping on < Back (top left).

Now that you know this, scan through the pages by tapping on Next > until you get to the Summary page with the big blue button on the bottom saying “Start Prayer”

Don’t tap on Start Prayer at this stage. The Summary page concludes the Prayer Review process, and launches the final, Prayer mode. But that’s for the next tutorial. Let’s go back now and see some details in the all-important Prayer Review process.

Importance of your Organiser setup

The Prayer Review process will bring you page by page through each of your Categories.

Both the Prayer Review pages and your Prayer View pages reflect how you have set up your Categories, Items, and Notes in the Organiser.

This shows the importance of your set up in the Organiser. So, if you want to open a Prayer with praise, you need to have the Praise Category first in your Categories list. It means giving some thought to how you wish to pray in the set up stage. If you don’t know how to do this, check out our Setting up MyPrayers tutorial. 

Let’s go through a typical review of a Category page.

A typical review and what you can do

Go back to the first page in Prayer Review mode, which, in our case, is Praise. Here’s what shows on my screen (yours may be different).

Here, under my Category “Praise” I have a list of Items I have designated as items I’d like to be reminded about and use when I pray in my Morning Prayer. You can see in the grey text within most of the Item cells that I have Notes attached to these Items.

In your review, what you would typically do is to review each Item and each Note and select what you want to include in your prayer. While that’s easy enough to do, the intention is not simply a case of tapping quickly on each Item; this is a time for reflection about each item.

Let’s select an item.

Tap on the grey selection button (a grey circle) on the right-hand-side of one of your Item cells (choose one that contains Notes). I’m going to choose the first in my list, God’s Holy Name: 

Now tap on the Item name (God’s Holy Name). Notice what happens …

The Notes contained in the Item drop down into view. In my case, there are five Notes (you may need to scroll the list up to see all the Notes). But, notice how, by having selected the parent Item to be included in this particular prayer, it automatically selects all Notes inside that Item? In your Prayer Review, you may intentionally do this. But, in the spirit of the review process, it’s probably better to do this another way. Let’s go back.

Tap on the blue selection circle next to the Item name again. It should turn off all the selection circles for both Item and Notes.

Now tap on the selection button on one of the Notes. Notice that this also automatically selects the Item as well, but doesn’t turn on all Notes (as we did above). 

You may say that it’s a moot point whether you select each Note, or that you deselect each Note! I don’t know about you, but I find the latter somewhat negative —choosing to NOT pray for something. I’d rather be positive in choosing what I wish to pray for in a prayer. But, we’re all different, and the option is yours!

Tap on the Item cell to close the Notes.