So I said in my last post that I would give my thoughts on prayer.
I do think that prayer is valuable. I think the main point of prayer is to align your will with God’s will. First of all, you have to believe and accept that God has a plan and that He has everything under control. If you don’t believe that it would be pretty hard for you to want to align with His plan.
But when you look at the way Jesus teaches us to pray in the gospels we don’t see examples of asking for certain things.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptations,
but deliver us from evil.
-Matthew 6:9-13
The only part of that prayer that sees us asking for anything is when we ask to “give us this day our daily bread”. And when you really think about it, you can survive off of less than you think. It isn’t give us this day our daily all-you-can-eat-buffet. So the majority of our prayer shouldn’t just be a long to-do list for God. Jesus says that should be about 1/4th of your prayer. The rest of the prayer calls us to praise God, ask for forgiveness and to pray for God’s will to be done in order to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.
So if we pray for something and it doesn’t happen, then we have to be at peace in the fact that God has things under control. And that is hard sometimes! Especially when you pray for someone to get better and they don’t, or for someone to stay safe on a trip and they don’t return. These are “good” things so it is hard to deal with when it doesn’t happen.
So I think we should pray, but not necessarily for the reason of us asking for things. We should pray in order to have that conversation/relationship with God so that maybe, just maybe, we can be a little more in tune with Him so that we can be more at peace and in-line with His plan.
– Jacob
Thoughts 