Prayer

This is an interesting subject in the Western culture. I have been to third world/developing countries and seen what life is like when you actually feel a "need" for God to get you through each day. Prayer is a powerful thing! Prayer, in those places, is what gets people through their hard, agonizing and sometimes terrifying days. And in the end, God is given all credit for answering prayers from daily bread to healing.

Then there is the Western culture. We have somehow replaced prayer with pills, food, doctors, stuff, mortgages we can't afford, a two car garage with 2.5 children a dog and a white picket fence. Who needs prayer? We have all the "daily bread" we need and much, much more! So we find ourselves in a culture that feels disconnected from God. We live as though God is just an ornament we can wear around our necks in the form of a cross. Our ticket into church each week.

So, which culture is the richer one? From my experience living in this culture and realizing how infrequent and inconsistent my prayer life can be and is, but also from spending many weeks in other cultures that are not as "blessed" with stuff as the US, I would quickly respond that our's is the poorer culture by far! We have found our needs met in the world...which is exactly what Jesus warns us against. Harder for the rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle??? I would contend that all of us (at least if we are reading this blog) are the rich man in that scenario. We fill our lives with so many things that we just try to fit God in when there is time. We work and play and pay bills and do so many things that we have to make an effort to have time for our faith! Crazy!

Prayer is the foundation of our relationship with God. That's right, relationship. We were not created to just believe in a distant, far-fetched Creator, cosmic God. We were made to be close and personal with a Savior! How close would you be to your husband or wife, best friend or sibling if you actually never had conversation with them. Would your relationship be authentic if you only talked highly of them to all the people you met, but never actually talked TO them? Of course not. Yet, so many of us...me included, try to have that sort of experience with God. We talk highly of him, even come to church in our fancy clothes and sing with the choir, but in the end of the day, we may not have ever stopped to pray and actually talk with God. So the question arises...how do we change?

Any suggestions?

-kelly