Praying

We are well in Holland MI. It was a beautiful weekend and somewhat on the cool side for this time of year. We head for Milwaukee tomorrow. We look forward to welcoming a new grand baby into our family and pray God's presence and care for Sarah as she delivers sometime this coming week. We will be there to watch Maya so we may need some prayers also. It will be a great week and we look forward to it.

Psalm 119:33-34; "Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end. Give me understanding, that I may keep Your law and observe it with my whole heart."

Quotes on prayer from A Guide To Prayer For All Who Seek God

"To pray well I need to face up to the realities about myself, that I would prefer to ignore; my anxieties, fears, private griefs, failures, lovelessness, my utter lack of resources. To accept the truth about what I am, as also the truth about other human beings, demands courage. If I do not pray well it is usually because I lack that kind of courage."

"Prayer is a way of living in the Presence. [Presence = God] It is, further a way of living in awareness of the Presence, even enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative [true prayer] is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows and delights in it."

"The one condition that precedes every kind of prayer is being present to God with conscious awareness. God is always present with us, whether or not we can feel this reality. In a very real sense, then, the foundation of all prayer is being present to the presence of God."

"Because intercession is such an incalculably great gift of God, we should accept it joyfully. The very time we give to intercession will turn out to be a daily source of new joy in God and in the Christian community."

"...prayer, like the whole of man's inner life, 'swings between the unseen and the seen.' Now both these movements are of course necessary in all Christians; but the point is that the second will only be well done where the first has the central place. The deepening of the soul's unseen attachment must precede, in order that it may safeguard, the outward swing towards the world."

Jesus said in Luke's Gospel that the disciples "ought always to pray and not lose heart or get discouraged. So may it be in our daily living.