The Impact of a Personal Invitation

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Each morning my grandma would routinely pray her rosary with her cup of coffee, and when she passed in 2018 my mom picked up this habit and took it one step further. She wrote down a list of names she wanted to pray for to help her quickly make it a habit to recite a daily rosary. Of course our immediate family made the cut, as well as her siblings and my dad's, friends and family members who had fallen away from the Church, neighbors, individuals from our parish, individuals who had asked for prayers, mentors, etc. Her list quickly began to grow in no time. She would then take a name from her list and insert their name into a Hail Mary on each bead.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for NAME now and at the hour of their death."

I found this to be incredibly helpful in developing my own prayer and making the rosary a daily part of my life! In the past I had tried incorporating a daily rosary in my life, but it didn't stick until I started putting a name to a rosary. I don't usually pray for 50 individuals per rosary, but at the end of each day I take an individual who has asked for prayers that day and offer them up by name. I use my mom's Hail Mary formula and "surprisingly" there's always someone in need of prayers throughout the day. And on the rare days I don't have a request, I have plenty of friends and family members in need of random prayers! This quickly became my way of personally inviting people into my prayer life.

The same can be applied to the personal invitations we make in our everyday lives, especially in our ministries.

As many of us have done before, we've written bulk Christmas cards or sent mass emails that go out to everyone in our contacts list. What I've noticed is there's a little psychology behind personal invitations, and how they are most effective when you use a first-name basis. Usually there are so many individuals in a mailing that personalization can seem overwhelming, when in reality there are plugins and tools to make it incredibly simple nowadays. Would you personally be quicker to read to an email that greeted you with your name at the top quicker than one that jumped straight into a generalized message?

It might at first seem like we're dancing with a sense of pride or self-preservation, maybe even walking the line of making someone only "feel" special. But at its root, people simply want to be seen and known. They want to be called by name to an important task or salutation, just as Christ did with each of His disciples. My challenge for you as we draw closer to the Christmas season is to see where you can slow down and make your generalized greeting more of a personal invitation, calling someone simply by their name closer to the heart of Christ.

But now, this is what the Lord, your Creator says, O Jacob, And he who formed you, O Israel, "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you from captivity; I have called you by name; you are Mine! Isaiah 43:1

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