This actually came to me yesterday - I've been hard at work writing my next book, Praying Like the Early Church, but yesterday I took a day off to run some errands and have my "office hours" (which some of you know actually means I'm sitting at an Italian restaurant where no one can find me, drinking wine and reading and journaling, and thinking my thoughts, and just doing the non-work part of an author's work, and most important, not caring what time it is). Anyway, I was reading what I thought was an unrelated book, and as God often does, he pointed out to me a couple things in someone else's book that will be helpful in framing what I need to write in my own book. And this point came together for me in a way it hadn't before.

We are often told we should pray "in Jesus' name." And there is nothing wrong with that, but as I've discovered, that isn't how the early Christians prayed. That is actually a more protestant way of finishing a prayer, and I suspect it was emphasized specifically to be a replacement for the "catholic" way of ending a prayer, which is to say, the original Christian way of ending a prayer. And what is that? It's the sign of the cross. From as early as we can tell, Christians made the sign of the cross, and the words that go with it: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" - that is actually the name in which we should pray - the name of the Trinity. At least, that's the way the earliest Christians prayed. Making the sign of the cross was itself considered a prayer - a prayer for blessing, and for protection, even when the person doesn't say the words out loud, the outward sign on the body becomes not only the prayer but a proclamation of the gospel to any who might see it.

So from now on I'm going to work harder to kick the old habit of ending a prayer by simply saying, "in Jesus' name, Amen," and instead end every prayer with the sign of the cross.

(Side note - it turns out you don't need to say Amen to your own prayers. That's really for when someone else vocalizes the prayer, and then you say Amen to agree with it.)