Prayer

I was driving in to work Monday morning and I was having a talk with God.  The Holy Spirit was revealing the purpose if prayer.  Deep down I feel I have always struggled with the practical side of prayer, yet deep down I also know that I have felt warmth, healing, and sense of community thru prayer.  Something else was revealed and maybe because I have been on a journey since reading the book by Francis Chan "Forever You and Me", almost a year ago.  In his book he talks about the greatness of God and how far that is above our family, friends, work, and other worldly items.

I pray, talk with God, and ask him to work in every aspect of my life and every minute I'm awake.  It is great incorporating love, compassion, and forgiveness into everything I do.  I think it is what God wants us to do.

One of my "resolutions" for 2016 was to put relationships first.  I would say that I am not a very good "relationship" person, but I wanted to be intentional about the times that I spent with people to be meaningful, and set aside time when possible to focus on meeting with people to learn about them and if possible have God speak through me to them.

The meaning of this post was to address the revelation about prayer, let e get to that, prayer is a method of putting the focus on God.  We know this, but there is something truly new to this idea for me.  Prayer is taking time out of our worldly lives to focus on the spiritual realm (which we do not live in) and focus on something where nothing else matters.  Think about this for a minute.  You are focusing on something that has no practical worldly reason.  Prayer may comfort us for a moment, allow us to connect to our inter being, allow us to relax, but even these are worldly pursues.  They are about us.  Prayer is about taking a putting a focus on how great God is.  It is looking at taking a personal limited resource, time, and dedicating that to something that is greater than all other things.  When we do this we are allowing God to be the center of our universe in that moment.  When we do this nothing else matters.

In the car a song I have not hear before came on the radio, it's title was, "Outta my Mind" by Anthem Lights.  The main line that caught my attention, which I typically do not focus on song lyrics, but again the Holy Spirit was pointing me to this, is "outta of my mind and into your heart", which is exactly what prayer is all about.  It is about getting our thoughts and ambitions out of being self focused and into the heart of God.