January 2022 Daily Office Challenge

Cultivate Happiness, Wholeness, and Hope in Christ

3 min readDec 12, 2021

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

What is the Daily Office and Why Do I Need It?

Welcome Friends

If you are here you are undoubtedly hungry for more — more peace, more wholeness, more hope…more Christ in your life. This is what the Liturgy of the Hours or Daily Office is all about.

What is the Daily Office?

In scripture we are called to “pray without ceasing,” and to continually focus our minds on Christ. We are also called to honor Christ in everything we do. This is not, however, how most Christians live. The Daily Office is designed to get us there. This practice has been practiced in monastic communities for two thousand years, but its roots are in the lives of David, John the Baptist, Christ, and the Desert Fathers.

In its simplest form, praying the Daily Office means carving out three to seven times per day to pray and meditate on scripture (usually a Psalm). By continually coming back to God throughout the day (instead of just once in the morning), one becomes anchored in Christ. If you do this you will increasingly find yourself more peaceful and less worried about every day affairs. You will “put on Christ” more and more, manifest the fruit of the spirt, and show others Christ’s love more than you ever have before.

This is not, however, about doing more in order to get to God or earn salvation. It is about creating silence and space in one’s life so that God can transform us.

I have written more fully about the Daily Office and its biblical basis here.

Why We Are Doing This

It can be hard, to make a major life change without the accountability and support community provides. It just helps to know that there are other like-minded people out there walking the same path. By signing up below you will give yourself the opportunity to join with people who are also giving the Daily Office a try in January of 2022.

How This Works

It’s pretty simple. You will select a prayer book and will commit to trying the Daily Office every day in January of 2022. This will mean deciding how many offices you will have per day and when you will pray and listen.

When you sign up I will have your phone number, and I will use that to put all group members into a Group Me chat. We will use this group chat throughout the challenge to encourage each other and report on (to your comfort level) how the challenge is going.

Selecting a Prayer Book

There are literally hundreds of prayer books you could choose from. Any book you choose will take some trial and error and some getting used to. Here are a few options:

I will be using this Benedictine prayer book for the challenge. It is an incredible resource but is expensive (this volume seems to appeal to both Catholics and Protestants).
Free access to the Book of Common Prayer (Protestant) can be found here as a daily app and here as a download. It will be up to you to spread these readings and prayers out throughout the day.
A lot of prayer books can be complicated to use. This one is very simple. I use this one regularly and have found it to be great for beginners. It is a Catholic prayer book but I would encourage fellow Protestants to give it a try. Order it soon, shipping on this one is slow. This book does not have devotionals.
Here is an extremely popular prayer book among Catholics.
Here are two options from Peter Scazzero (featured in the above video). These are really great introductions to the Daily Office. They only have two offices per day, but that is probably plenty for beginners. These books have devotionals.
There are so many options out there. I suggest you find one that fits your denominational preference and looks interesting to you.
Here is a free prayer book I have put together.