More Thoughts About Talking Into The Dark
Where did the idea of prayer come from?
A while back I wrote —
What if the entire outcome of our lives is based on prayer?
Not just the idea that it would be a good idea to cover ourselves by praying, but that praying is the central key element for a successful life?
What if prayer is more important than having intense desire, expending herculean efforts, planning with extreme detail and precision, or fostering and developing the right connections?
What if there is no such thing as luck? — but that what appears to the outside viewer as a lucky break is the working of an invisible hand?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not discounting any of these other important activities that take up so much of our time and energy.
But what if they are much less important than we and others believe, compared with something so hazy or unmanageable as prayer?
The power behind prayer has to do with tapping into a quiet mysterious communication with God.
It exists because we are told it exists, not because we (meaning you reading this and I writing this) made it up.
Of course prayer looks like nothing at all.
When seen by a third party, those engaged in prayer appear to be talking into empty space.
And for those who have not had the opportunity to learn about prayer from a serious practitioner or many, the most reasonable reaction to the idea that prayer works in any regard whatsoever is to scoff heartily.
Overtime, however, most of us discover that life is a deeper, more complex, even more bizarre journey than we could have imagined when we were growing up — unless our childhood was more difficult than enjoyable. But even then, just because we may have faced greater than the normal trials in our earliest years, it did not necessarily result in a more mature and rational world perspective later.
I believe it was God who prayed for us first.
We then were invited to respond.
When we did, the new link was forged and is present even now, regardless how much or little we have used it.
And just like babies over time learn the language of their parents, we can learn the language of our Heavenly Father.
And once we learn the language principles of prayer and begin to seriously and methodically use it to communicate, our lives begin to change in the deepest of ways, from the inside out.
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
Matthew 7:7-8 (ESV)
