by Paul Cleaver

Created on: March 12, 2010   Last Updated: March 13, 2010

Understanding the primary purpose of prayer

Understanding the primary purpose of prayer in one’s life gives the act of self reflection more power than one would ever admit at the outset of one’s life as a prayerful being. We all seek times in our lives that we wish to communicate with a being that is greater than us mortal men. This being I choose to call God.

Various faiths and organizations throughout the world use many varying names for the grand architect of all that there is. Whether that name is God or Allah or Jehovah we each in our own way seek to communicate with that supreme deity. There are times when we communicate via prayer and there are other times when we communicate indirectly via an unspoken method that is not exactly called prayer. We have times in our lives that are a severe struggle and we look to our God for guidance and protection. Many times these needs are met and many times they are not. We cannot choose the method or the time frame with which the Lord will choose to answer our prayers. Even an unspoken prayer serves as a prayer of sorts. And the fact that God knows all and sees all leaves us with the results of prayer without making the specific act of asking verbally for help and guidance.

What else in this world has such power that whether you actively verbalize your request to the Lord for help or you just place yourself in a position of not asking for help which in and of itself is a prayer of sorts. So the power of such a concept is infinite when seen from that point of view. Many people believe that they will be saved from eternal damnation if they practice the concept of prayer on a daily basis.

Others feel that there is no point in prayer because there is no one that you can pray to. The atheists believe that there is no God, while the agnostics question the very existence of a Higher Power. So this group of people feels that prayer is simply offering up a request to the emptiness of the cosmos. And when there is no apparent response to that prayer they will say, “See I told you that there is no God, why waste your time praying to nothing?” We that believe there is a God know that when we offer up prayer that we cannot expect an immediate response even though there have been examples of just such a response. However for the most part we wait for the Lord to answer our prayers in his time not ours. We cannot wait for a response with a stopwatch that tracks the time we feel that God should answer our

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