by Melissa Manning

Created on: January 25, 2009

Prayer is communication. Most people who pray believe that they are praying to someone or something that is able and willing to offer help and comfort. In prayer, they are reaching out to something for something.

There are many different approaches to prayer. I offer some that have worked for me over the years, evolving from things I have experienced and things I have learned.

I pray to the Christian God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I believe that God hears me, responds to me, and sometimes speaks to me. I take no credit for this, although I delight in the relationship. I am convinced that God chose me to be His child and reached out to me not because I had something He wanted or needed, but because He had something He wanted to give to me.

Over the years, I have loved God, especially at first when knowing Him transformed my life. I remember the sheer delight of loving Him and knowing He loved me. I did not keep that rapture for long, but I never lost the warmth of it.

I remember that, after really acknowledging Him as Lord of my life, I found the well-known details of His interaction with mankind alive with new meaning. In those early days I really did 'pray without ceasing,' since I was always talking with God in my heart.

That honeymoon period was followed by a time when I was seeking to recapture that first love, while coping with marriage and children. I read a lot of books about prayer and spent a lot of effort trying to build good prayer habits. I never was very successful in that area. I remember the time I determined to 'pray through' about two neighborhood infants facing potential surgery. 'Praying through' was an old practice of praying for as long as it took to feel that an answer was heard; the process generally took hours and sometimes days. I set aside a morning to really attempt to be faithful in this. That was the only time I ever received what is called 'assurance of prayer.' I asked God to touch those two babies and I immediately knew He had done so. The time this took? Less time than it took to write about it! That was a definite surprise.

Another memory from that time in my life still makes me smile. I was trying to break a habit that I felt God wanted me to give up, although many Christian writers didn't feel it was a problem. I had prayed about it and wrestled with it and finally 'put up a fleece.' This practice refers to the time when Gideon asked God to give him a sign so that Gideon would be sure he was really hearing from God. It involves

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