Prayer

Prayer is one of the Christian disciplines that many of us struggle with daily. We all have problems with being a person of humility; not being able to set aside time in our busy lives to have intimate conversations with our creator. If you think about it, this life of ours that is so busy, isn’t ours to begin with. So when we set apart the time to engage in prayer we find it difficult because of the following reasons:

We are afraid to be bare before the Lord. In a time of prayer and one on one conversation it can be scary to lay everything completely on the table before Him. We think we can hide our lives but the truth is that God sees it all. Better us to lay it all down and be real with the Lord. He created us to have feelings and thoughts; if you know your friend is going on a first date you always want to have all the details although you can guess what happened. God wants the details and to talk with us.
We assume. When in prayer, if we pray about something once, sometimes we will assume that If our prayer isn’t answered the next day or right then that God said no. Or, we assume the answers before coming to the Lord in prayer about something. God is faithful and we are called to pray without ceasing.
Is God really there? At times people can feel so far away from God that they don’t feel Gods presence or they don’t think God cares about them. So what’s the point in praying when He’s not there? As we discussed in our Rhythm Life Group tonight, God is never more than even an arms length away and He longs to hear our voices speaking to Him.
Wrong answer. This somewhat agrees with assumption; we are afraid to get the answer we don’t want, most of the time its ‘no.’ We are unable to accept anything other than what we want, selfish right? God only wants the best for us, so He will always let His ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and His ‘no’ be ‘no.’ Do not fear for the future because the Lord already has marvelous plans.
We don’t know how to pray or what to pray for. Struggles with praying for something when you aren’t even sure what is going on. Romans 8:26-28 says: “ In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Holy Bible, NIV).

It is essential to our walk and growth in Christianity to spend time in prayer. Prayer brings so many bountiful blessings, ones we could not even fathom. When we pray we can be at peace, I loved the quote from McDonnell that stated just this: “True rest is happening when we pause regularly amidst daily routines to sort out the truths and commitments by which we are living” (McDonnell, p. 196, 2003). When I find myself frustrated with urn-answered prayer I have to remind myself that the Lord is at work every moment, and He always knows what is best. A testament to that is when I fasted and prayed last summer for 2 specific friends and the prayers were carried out not instantly but over this year and have found themselves in full right now. I could not help but cry and thank the Lord for being faithful and showing me that I can rest in Him and trust Him to listen and answer prayer.