Does Prayer Work?

If we believed as much as we prayed, we would stop praying and start dancing!

Does prayer work? Quite often we would be forced to say, hmmm, well, not really.
Afraid of directly saying NO prayer does not work, we hem and we haw. But the visible truth is
our prayers don't work. That does not mean God does not listen to our prayers but more like there being something wrong with what we say when we pray.

I believe prayers work! Period. What we don't realize is when we pray with our lips God is listening with His heart and not with His ears. In His heart He hears the truth that exists in our hearts of our wants and needs. He sees the whole picture.

He hears what we ask for, then looks in our hearts and finds some other need we don't want to acknowledge, looks in our body and finds yet another need we have, in our minds there is still another and most probably different need altogether.

God, in his infinite wisdom, combines every thing together and comes up with the best possible answer to our prayers and this I believe - no sooner than we approach God, God Replies.

The problem is, God does not send down money when we say we need it; God does not send down a typed-in resume with the company's name on it when we say we need a new job and so on and so forth. Our God sends down opportunities through which we can achieve what we pray for. But since we are looking for complete answers in gift-wrapping we fail to see God's replies and so very often we say prayer does not work.

For instance, we pray for peace in our community and God sends us an annoying neighbor who is meant to be the way for us to achieve the peace we have prayed for. Not knowing the way God works we pray once again for peace in our community but this time add a small note to our prayer - Lord, please take that person away from here, he is disturbing our community.

God sends opportunity, hundreds and hundreds of opportunities, a continuous stream of wonderful opportunities but opportunities to do what?

I believe it is easy to understand what these opportunities are meant for IF we reflect on the basics of our God. Our God is Love. We exist, this world exists because of God's love for us. With so much love there could be just one end to God's plan for us - to bring us back to loving Him and every other creature He has created. If we humbly think that this is God's plan then obviously the opportunities are meant for only one thing - to find love, seek love, create more love.

Let us remember this the next time we pray and when we see our prayers answered in opportunities we will know we are right when we see the opportunities leading us to love.

P.S. Did not stop to edit or anything so I hope I've not confused you or anything

Finest,

Jerome D