This morning in church I listened to Garnett Slatton talk about spending the morning with God — not in a time-consuming manner (since most of our time seems to be consumed with other things), but in a way in which we begin our day conversing with God. Hopefully by starting off the day with that conversation, we can keep it up throughout all that we do.

The “conversation with God” is another way of talking about prayer, which leads me to the question: what exactly is prayer? Is it simply a conversation between us and God? Is it us clearing our minds of our distractions in order to focus only on God, instead of on ourselves? Is it something sometimes, and something different other times?

I do believe that prayer is a conversation between God and me. I also have prayer before and felt like I heard nothing in response. That is not unusual. So when I feel like the conversation is more of a one-way thing, even when I am listening (since a typical response to this will be “you just must not be listening hard enough”), does that make the prayer less valuable? Perhaps my prayers will lead me to change. Certainly praying to God gets my mind off of my own selfish desires and onto him, and that’s important. Sometimes, though, I pray selfishly, focusing solely on my wants and needs, so what then?

Truly, the way prayer works is a deep mystery. Since we do not understand the connections that we have to God, how can we hope to understand how or even why prayer works?

Of course, that’s not to imply that we should not seek to understand what prayer is or how it works. In fact, I’ve included a little flash thing, below, to show you what others have had to say about the subject. And please chime in with a comment: what do you think prayer is? how do you think prayer works?