Last week I mentioned that I don’t consider myself a “prayer”, meaning that I don’t generally feel comfortable praying for long periods of time. However, this week I learned something that has helped me understand prayer in a new way, and I’d like to share it with you.
Part of my challenge with prayer, as I mentioned last week, is that I feel like I should be “doing” something. Of course prayer IS “doing” something, but I’ve never really understood what prayer was doing. Can you relate?
I’ve read and heard many beautiful thoughts about prayer. Each of these I felt were correct, but I still did not understand what prayer was accomplishing.
You see I’ve prayed more prayers where the answer was “No” than prayers that the answer was “Yes”. (I’m not even including the “Wait” answers.) This is probably the experience of most people, but I’ve not asked. I know that I was using the wrong words — God’s answers are not based on my performance as a prayer. But with the tract record I had, I began to wonder what I was accomplishing through my prayers.