Prayers means to me the practice of being aware of God, consciously choosing to commune and respond to God, and act as directed by God. Responding to the Activity of God requires that I give God my attention, and recognize that as I live out my life in unity with God, this divine activity can be brought forth through me.
My intent is to disciple myself in the practice of the awareness of God’s All-Presence and All-Power. Though my efforts are often faltering, I keep on keeping on.
I believe there are as many ways to pray as there are individuals. For me, the hour in bed before I arise a precious period of prayer meditation. Then the morning period of reading, journaling and silence sets the tone and basis for a desire to be recognizing God’s Presence in all aspects, attitudes, relationships, and actions.
Through daily growing and deeper relationship in and with God , I aspire to change and be more in the likeness of the Christ Consciousness.
Prayer to me is an unfolding process of a pilgrimage HOME, from sense to SOUL, from self to CHRIST, from the outer to the INNER. This allows God’s Presence and Activity to quicken my spirit, heal and increase my desire, and strengthen my will.
For me the ultimate goal of prayer is to come into a realization, through God’s Divine Grace, that I am abiding in Christ. I remind myself often of my Lord’s statement, “I of myself can do nothing (no-thing). It is the Father within me that doeth the works.” I also often remind myself of my complete dependency upon God.
In this journey from a sense of separation from God to an abiding in Christ, I accept the truth, that I am a spiritual being learning to be human, which is in harmony with Jesus’ statement to the Samaritan woman at the well, “God is Spirit and they that worship God must worship God in Spirit and in Truth.”
Very slowly, yet steadily, I am more aware that even as my Lord commanded, I must “not judge by outer appearances and conditions,” but continue to recognize, acknowledge, affirm, claim, and appropriate within myself and all persons and situations, the Truth and Reality of my Creator’s All-Presence and All-Power.
This is what prayer means to me even as, so slowly, I grow into this inner feeling and heart-knowing of my unity and oneness with God and all life.
With the period of silence, partaking of God’s character and nature, and with the intent and action of participating with God’s purposes of caring, sharing, giving, and serving, I am being prepared to fulfill my divine inheritance of expressing and bringing forth the Kingdom God desires to manifest through me. This is the destiny for each of us.
So help me, God, with You all good is possible. You know my intent each day is to “be born again… in Spirit and in Truth.”
— Originally published in ‘The United Prayer Tower’ Newsletter Issue #42, December 1997