On Spirituality… Pray!

Back when I was a teenager one of the great rock and roll bands I spent many hours listening to were The Doors, with lead singer Jim Morrison yelling, bellowing, screaming, out the lyrics. One of these screams of his was an intro to a song that said “you cannot petition the Lord with prayer”! I have thought about this phrase many times in my life and sometimes I tend to agree.
I have been writing to you for years now about spirituality, and our life in this world with God, yet I rarely write about prayer, or how we talk to God. Part of the reason for staying away from the subject specifically is because we all pray differently. I would never assume that my way of praying was better or more effective than yours, and while I would like to hear how you pray, I don’t think I would change my way to match yours. What we have is a relationship with our higher power and it is our higher power that teaches us how to talk, just as a mother and father teach their young. It is this talking to God that is our prayer. What if a child were left in the jungle, raised by gorillas, would that boy or girl learn to speak? Of course not. It is by spending time with its parents and other family members that the child learns the language. It is the same with God, we learn to pray by spending time with God. We learn the language of the heart and how to pray with our hearts. This is where God resides and is found, in our hearts.
I am afraid of many things these days. The violence in the world, global economics that can lead to large scale wars, our dwindling resources, climate change, racial inequality, social-economic inequality, and a host of others. Despair comes knocking on my hearts door, and I know not to let it in, and I know that my weapon against this worry and anxiety is prayer, because I can petition the Lord with prayer, we can, you and I. If we are believers and we subscribe to the Bible then we know that we can move the hand of God, and that before it was our world it was God’s world, and it is still God’s world. God will come to the rescue; God will save the day, hallelujah! All we have to do is ask Him. Pray! Pray! Pray!