How can I pray? ...

Friday, Sept 26, 2014. I just skipped over all the bible passages which we looked at yesterday about prayer. But how are you feeling about it? Is prayer something you could grasp? Is it easy for you to pray? Let us take some time to ask the important questions here!

Strange Feelings, Secular Mode …

How can I pray? Do you know this feeling: when someone says you should pray, it feels strange. I do not know how to start. The words do not come easy. I feel like making myself a fool. I hear the voices which ridicule me. Some adult men and he prays. He is not a child. He is not an old woman who has nothing else any more than a church. How can he pray? Is he a little strange?

There are all those difficulties with prayer. There is another one: who do you address? Who is this God we are asked to pray to? Is something there? Is someone there? It feels strange to talk into the silence. Do we fool ourselves?

When we go into what I would call “secular mode”, then God does not exist in our feelings or our world view. There is just nature, there are other humans, there are our plans, our goals, there are our fears. We know natural laws. We know ethics, and we still know, somehow, that we should not hurt each other. But we do not know why, since we all die anyway. Then we try not to think further, since it does not lead us anywhere. We want some principles, we can follow, so we choose those we like best.

Spiritual Mode …

We can also go into what I would call “spiritual mode”. When we do not know God, we are willing to believe that he is there, that he hears us, and that he will find his ways to answer what we tell him. We are willing to be open to him, to address him. We know that it is a reasonable thing to pray to the creator, to the father.

There is also a spiritual mode of the believers, of those, who got to know God much better and have trusted their life into his hands. You become a believer by putting your life into Gods hands - and then he comes into your life with his Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit comes into your own spirit - and brings a deep connection to the Lord. Within this connection, you know God in a very intimate way. It is no longer as in the secular mode. It is no longer as if there is no one there. He IS there, and on a deep layer of your existence you know it, you feel it (not always, but again and again), you can trust in it.

The New Testament talks a lot about the Holy Spirit, about Jesus being with us through the spirit, all the time. The world does not need to be empty, it can be full of God, day by day, in all what we do. When we trust our life into his hands, the spirit comes, and then again and again driven by his overflowing love. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts