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Christian prayer and meditation app Hallow has just celebrated the significant achievement of facilitating over 100 million prayers.
According to Fox News, Hallow – created by 29-year-old Alex Jones – has been downloaded more than 3.75 million times by users in around 150 countries since its launch in 2018.
In a phone interview with Fox News Digital, Jones shared that he was inspired to create Hallow after experiencing the benefits of meditation using secular apps Headspace and Calm.
“I thought they were super useful tools for learning meditation from the comfort of your own home,” Jones told the outlet.
He also noted that despite a strained relationship with Christianity, he always thought of God and Christianity when he meditated.
“Every time I meditated, my mind felt drawn to something Christian. An image of the cross, or the Trinity, or the Holy Spirit, which I found very odd,” Jones explained.
This prompted Jones to reach out to ministers, friends and family of the faith to discuss the possibility of meditation being tied to Christianity.
“I would ask, ‘Hey, is there a way to have an intersection between all this faith stuff and this meditation stuff? “, He said.
“They all laughed at me and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been doing this for about 2,000 years. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called the “prayer,” Jones added.
It was then that Jones, relying on his Catholic faith, decided to code and create the Catholic meditation and prayer app.
He chose the name Hallow – which means “to make holy” – after meditatively reading the Lord’s Prayer.
“Our Father, hallowed be thy name,” Jones said. “It just changed my life – it made me cry,” he added.
“It brought me back to my faith. It changed everything about what I value and the most important part of who I am.”
This revelation also led Jones to wonder, “Does God call me to be holy? … Should I help others to grow in virtue?
Today, people from many different faiths around the world use the app to guide them in their daily prayer rituals.
“We have users like me, who have young families and teenagers who want to form habits, and we have retirees or those nearing the end of their life who are trying to use this time to dive deeper into their relationship. with God,” he says.
“God can reach out to anyone at any stage of their life,” Jones said.
The app also contains prayers, meditations and thoughts from top Christian celebrities like actor Mark Wahlberg, former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz.
Photo credit: Abby Dinosaur/Unsplash
Kayla Koslosky has been the editor of ChristianHeadlines.com since 2018. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and history and has previously written and served as editor of yellow jacket newspaper. She wrote about her Blog since 2012 and has also contributed to IBelieve.com and Crosswalk.com.
