Pray

A recent conversation I had with a friend revealed how she was struggling with her prayer life. She shared that nothing seemed to stir in her when she prayed. It seemed her prayers weren’t getting answered, and it often felt like she was just “talking to the celling.” If I am honest, I have felt this too. For me, I have these thoughts mostly during corporate prayer. When I hear other people pray, I can’t help but wonder what good it’s doing. It often feels like we are praying because that’s what good Christians do. For example, we have to pray before we eat because if we don’t then people will think that we are less holy or something. We also need to pray before we undertake a challenge like a test or a sporting event because then we might gain a Divine advantage. And then, of course, when we pray on our own, we ask for a list of things that will make our lives easier. To make matters worse, any time someone shares something that they are going through, we slap a few prayers on it and expect that it will all be better. I have heard numerous stories of people going through unbelievably hard things, only to be told that if they would just pray more, then their problem would go away. We take prayer and twist it into a tool used to give us what we want and then we get mad at God when what we ask for doesn’t happen. We seem to think that we can manipulate God if we just pray enough. Prayer is all about us.

The culture that I see around prayer is honestly off-putting. It is a distortion of one of the greatest tools that we have to connect with God. I am not surprised that it has been so messed up. The tempter tends to take things that are good and twist them in our minds, so that we miss out on what they are intended to be. With so much brokenness around prayer, it can be overwhelming. How can prayer be redeemed? To answer this question, I asked myself why I pray. My answer was simple: Prayer is the main way in which I connect with God. It’s my way to communicate with him and It gives me a way to invest in my relationship with him. This was not always what prayer was for me. It used to be simply something I did because I was supposed to do it, but about five years ago that started to shift. I hit a point in my life where I was feeling lost and lonely, so I started going for prayer walks. As I walked, I would imagine that Jesus was walking right beside me and I would speak aloud to him about how I was doing. We would talk about the things that I was learning about myself in that season of life and we would wrestle with the things that were making me feel discouraged. The time that I spent in prayer became about sharing the things that were going on in my life with Christ, just like I would if I were talking to a close friend who was walking through my challenges with me. This exercise was the start of me rebuilding my prayer life.

Since first experimenting with prayer walks, I have dabbled in a few other types of prayer. Some I have found more helpful than others, but they all have the same purpose -- to help me connect with my creator. I occasionally write out prayers in a journal. Usually, they take the form of a letter. I find that this helps me to process the things that I have going on because it is an external form of prayer. Another way that I pray from time to time is through silencing my mind in an act of prayerful meditation. When I engage with God this way, I am able to “be still and know.” This helps me to feel fully known and loved by the creator of the entire universe. I also sometimes use prayer books. They allow me to reflect on someone else’s words as I pray. I find that this can be beneficial when I don’t know what to pray. While these are all common practices for me, the way I pray most is silently throughout my day.  Because I believe that prayer is all about developing a relationship with God, I strive to live in constant communication with him. Praying throughout my day, regardless of what I am doing, helps me to shift my focus onto Christ and helps me to live a life that more clearly reflects him.

Prayer is an essential part of my faith walk. It’s my primary connection to God. It’s about talking with God about what is going on in my life. It’s not a tool that is to be used to simply manipulate God into doing the things that I want; instead, it’s how I get to invest in my relationship with him. I believe that he wants to have a relationship with each of us, but relationships take communication. I can’t think of a better way to grow a relationship with God than to talk to him.