Are you there God? It's me...

Imagine you are sitting down to pray and this happens.

You sit down ready to have a conversation with the Lord and all of a sudden you find it very difficult to even come up with words. You sit and sit and try to come up with something to say, but nothing seems to come out right. You start over many times with "Dear Lord..." or "God..." The inability to come up with a prayer becomes frustrating, so your mind begins to wander to things such as the other people in the room or the sounds around you.

Has that ever happened to you?  It has definitely happened to me on many occasion. I kept asking myself, "What is the road block in my way that makes it so difficult to cross the prayer road and have a conversation with the Lord?"

The answer, I think, was that I was trying to hard.

I was lucky enough to attend a Theology on Tap series on Thursday April 19th where the topic was on spending time in prayer with God. This was exactly what I needed to help me refocus on my prayer life. Auxiliary Bishop Mark Seitz gave a wonderful talk on what prayer looks like, and how we can become more involved in our conversations with God.

Prayer, according to St. Thomas Aquinas is the "unveiling of our mind in the presence of God" and as "the soul's affectionate quest for God". Great! But how does someone successfully unveil their minds and whole-heartedly seek out God through prayer?

I guess the first place to start is to reflect on the approach to prayer. Prayer is a very intimate moment that you share with God. It is a time of petition, thanksgiving, adoration, and a time to ask for forgivness.  When I get ready to pray, what is the attitude I bring? Where is my effort and focus during prayer? Do I have the willingness to practice prayer in order to talk more openly and easily with God? In order to become better at something, we often have to practice. Is that not the same with prayer?

Bishop Seitz challenged everyone to think about these questions very seriously.When we pray, Bishop Seitz mentioned that we have to speak from the heart; we have to be there in the presence of God. As we open ourselves to the presence of God in our time of prayer, our conversations will not only become more honest, but more passionate in our dialogs with God. I was reminded that if we stop, breath, and slow down at the begining of prayer and really focus on the moment at hand, we can feel Gods presence and the feeling that He is there and is ready to listen. If we take the time to breath in the moment with God, it might become easier to commicate with God in a heartfelt dialog.

Bishop Seitz discussed different reasons for prayer. He mentioned prayers of petition where we seek to find an answer or a solution or help for a problem in our lives. Seitz made it very clear that you can never ask for God's intercession too many times. God wants us to come to Him in prayer with struggles and petitions. We also can pray out of thanksgiving for the wonderful joys that God has placed in our lives. We also pray in adoration for the marvels that God has created for us out of love. Lastly, we can pray to ask for forgiveness. Often times this is a hard prayer to pray. We must approach this type of prayer with honesty. We cannot hide the truth about ourselves. God knows every inch of us and every thought or action we do. We have to trust that He will have mercy on us time and time again.

When we participate effectively in prayer, we come to a different perspective of life, as Bishop Seitz says. We see the world from a different perspective at that moment when we open our eyes to hopes and joys of having God on our side. When we open our eyes, we open ourselves to God's will and that He directs everything to the good. Our trust in him grows deeper that He will get us through whatever is in our paths with infallible hands.

So I challenge you to take a minute to reevaluate your prayer life and think about steps you can take to open yourselves up more fully to the awesome gift of prayer. I will leave you with a quote that Bishop Seitz left for us to consider as he challenged us to continue to grow in our prayer life,

“Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.”
― Alexis Carrel