Thursday/Friday 5th Week of Lent

Relationships over things

(Sorry I had too much on my plate this week and a number of things slid in favor of maintaining intimacy with God).

Questions for reflection:
How did you learn to pray?
What is your earliest memory of prayer?

For me, I learned from the Book of Common Prayer. I would pour over the book looking for the prayer that addressed the situation I wanted to pray for because I believed prayers would only be effective if they had been made by someone holier than me. While I recommend praying words to God that are your own, this season with the prayer book served me well.

I learned to praise God first and now realize that in doing so I was usually recalling a testimony of what God had done in the past so that he would do something similar again.

I learned to ask for things that others had tested as part of God's heart and so by experience learned about praying within the will of God.

I learned to close prayer giving glory to God and expecting God to do God's will and not mine.

Eventually I learned to pray words straight from my heart, but in some ways because I'd sought so earnestly for prayers, the prayer book words were also prayers from my heart. So, the prayer book with the community that worshiped guided by it led me into relationship with God.