Prayer

What is prayer? For me it’s really a way to tap into God’s heart, this is a mean of feeling how The Great One truly feels about us. This is how I feel comfort, calmness in the midst of troubles. This is the time where I can hear what the Holy Spirit tells me to do, and trust me, sometimes The Spirit can also tell me what’s about to happen to me, but this is a different story. Prayer can be silence for a long period of time, and still it feels like you’re screaming for more silence as the inner man tries to commune with God. Before I always admire how the psalmist assemble words of passion about God, but when you come within that place where God’s feelings and yours meet, silence can truly mean a lot of words. No words can be uttered, and sometimes I feel that He’s just hushing me, placing His finger on my lips and just telling me to enjoy Him, and after experiencing these, I wanted more, I’m ruined and changing slowly. My passion for prayer goes hand in hand with my Christian day-to-day walk. Before I was compelled to do these things, but more of my own will and strength, everything has to be done to satisfy the “Christian” title. Little did I know that the root of all the actions points to the time you spend with the one we choose to mirror, our own secret time with Jesus. I have always admired preachers, and worship leaders, I have always admired their knowledge and their passion for such things, and I wanted that joy, I wanted that satisfaction that they get when they do what the spirit tells them. I see it in the people we always see on TV, I read them on books and articles over the net. I admire the words that the singers sing, and I wanted that as well, thinking that these things would please God, ministry. I never gave prayer a chance seeing that I’m already doing these stuff, and sometimes asking for the Lord to give me some slack because I’m already doing these stuff, the stuff that makes my teeth grind when I do it, or think about doing it. And I wonder, how do these guys do it? How could the preachers speak with so much confidence and ease, how could singers arrange songs as if they read lyrics carved out from God’s heart, and little did I know that a lot can be birthed from the quiet time that I despised back then. This is where I started to ask for encounter in prayer. At first it was the wordy prayer, everything that came into my mind was the words that came out of my heart, and I started to notice, these are the same words that I speak night in and night out. I got bored, I got bummed with prayer that I just went from 5 minutes tops, to “Thank you for this day, thank you for bringing me home safe, Amen”. Then I started to let my heart do the talking. There was a night when I felt the Holy Spirit tell me of what’s going to happen. I really saw it flash on my head before I made the decision to surf the net, and I brushed it aside feeling that I’m not that weak to fall into lust again. But then I did, and I did exactly what was warned beforehand. Right there and then, my heart screamed and asked for forgiveness. No words but sorry and long moments of silence and through those moments of silence are where I really felt forgiveness and love. No words were uttered but still it was like the Lord was answering everything that my heart was asking. It felt like I’m hearing my heart and the Lord having a sweet and deep conversation about me. And so I asked is this how prayer should be done? Am I really reaching out to you and having a conversation in the heart level? No words were spoken that night, but something changed within me. A burning passion of tapping into that place again, a hunger for God’s heart beat a hunger for that comfort even on times of guilt, there truly is no condemnation in Christ, there is truly delight in his presence, and that is where my passion for prayer ignited. Knowing God in a heart level and feel his kindness for a sinner like me, strengthened me and made me see the cross for what it truly is, a way back to God’s arms, and deeper, his heart. I never really knew God for who he really is. Now the words that are written in the Bible lives compared to the literature that I saw before. And I believe that you can only have that satisfaction that we see in a preachers face as he/she delivers the word of God, and how the song writers arrange such beautiful and inspired words that they sing is when God is REAL within us. And the reality of God can only be attained if we believe that He is, and that belief can be sparked by an encounter through prayer.