Practical Prayer

INTRODUCTION

Would you like to know once and for all if God is truly real? If somehow He really can reveal himself to you and actually do something in your life—and you see the absolute proof of it? I am not saying that you may demand that He show Himself to you; I am saying that by humbly bowing to your Creator and asking for help in your life’s ongoing plights, He will do just that. This could be considered a “how to pray in a practical way” book in sharing specific exercises in corresponding with God.
I’m going to warn you right now: this is not your run-of-the-mill, feel-good, precious and pretty, vague and safe book on prayer. It is down in the rain-soaked everyday trenches where the mud of life is lived. It is real. It is where I am going and have been. It is where you are and will be—at your job, at home and in your marriage, at school, driving down the road, anywhere and wherever, today and tomorrow. Next year. For the rest of your life.
No, I am not a celebrity. I’m certainly not rich or famous, and I’m not really anybody special. I am just a humble someone who discovered something incredible in an incredible way, and in this writing, I will do my utmost to share it in such a manner that hopefully will draw you to discover it too. The best way I can do that is to simply recall everything exactly as it happened. Perhaps you will recognize similar situations you have experienced in your past or that you are presently living through, and of course what you may very well undergo in your future.
Throughout my entire being, I crave that you and every human soul living and yet to be born have ultimate knowing faith that, not only is God real, but that He will walk with us through actual communication, through answered prayer. That He is more than able to get us through any and every anxious, desperate, puzzling, needing, questioning, grieving moment of our lives. That we can experience pure, unequaled joy and comfort that comes with witnessing firsthand the response and active involvement of the great and awesome compassionate Creator of everything, every molecule seen and unseen throughout the infinite universe.
Yes, our all-wise, all-knowing, caring God is always available to us and can guide us and get us through anything.
It’s the same one who gave you and me our eyes to see a wonderful spectrum of colors and focus near and far away with pupils that close and open from bright light to shadows and who lovingly bestowed taste buds for us to enjoy our food, with a processing plant in our stomach and intestines that digest and convert it to energy. We also have resounding vocal cords with which to speak and sing and eardrums to hear and listen. And best of all, among these and many more wondrous attributes, the ability to love so deeply and feel throughout our entire being the greatest knowing of joy when we ourselves are truly loved.
Also, rivaling the most powerful computers, each of us has a marvelous brain, capable of countless activities. In semblance to this subject of writing, every last one of our minds does, in fact, produce low-frequency brainwaves. In this modern scientific age of cell phones and microwave towers that allow us to send and receive messages by invisible waves, each with its own dial frequency, we should actually be inspired to believe in the working of prayer as written in Holy Scripture. When we dial up and direct our prayers to the Almighty, our eagerly devoted Architect who gave us those brainwave frequencies can and will amaze us as He is able to respond and give personal, intimate attention to our own continual deep or shallow breath, seemingly never-ending dilemmas. “Call to me and I will answer you” (Jeremiah 33:3 NIV). And, of course, brainwaves may not even be how He does any of it anyway, but then again, we don’t have to know exactly how He works His magic, only that He does.
I contend there is evidential proof and confirmation to be realized by each and every one of us that we really are able to have an ongoing relationship with this loving Artist of all there is and will be. Yes, magical evidence, but real nonetheless. This no-limitation, all-powerful, faithful God is always available to us—to help, to protect, to comfort, and to willfully give practical advice and direction to any question, hard or easy, or even seemingly impossible.
It is true that the sole intent of this book is to encourage and hopefully inspire you to participate in this wonderful way of life. I give truthful testimony in this writing on every page with your success in life as its aspiration and priority. The following relived prayer events and their outcomes are so continually consistent in pattern that they simply cannot be dismissed as mere coincidences. Yet still, they are my reality, my firsthand manifestations offered to you, not just for fair-minded scrutiny, but to motivate you to take your own prayer actions and witness your own amazing evidence.
As you proceed through the succeeding pages, I beg you to be steadfast in keeping in mind that the underlying intent of this true-events sharing of discovery is just that: to lovingly and caringly entice you to open-mindedly seek and then find your own most exciting, rewarding life imaginable. And perhaps release the held-back incredible passion that has been waiting to break through and overflow an unparalleled exhilarating enthusiasm. In sincere honesty and humility, I am in no way saying, “Look what I have done,” but I am earnestly saying, “Look what God has done and can and wondrously will do in your life!” That is, if you humble yourself and ask Him to.
For many years after I first became a Christian, I lived a life of complacency and even sinful rebelliousness. Unfortunately, I did not know or think that God was even capable of answering a prayer in our modern time period; I believed He resided in a spiritual world that no longer touched our realm. I thought His activity and involvement stopped after His Holy Scriptures were compiled into the Bible (which, now that I think about it, doesn’t make sense with so many Scriptures telling us to pray). When I finally researched it, I found the most referenced Bible topic was love and the second most was related to prayer and praying.
Maybe there are some or many of you who already believe that God truly does answer prayer. For you, this writing is intended to give you profound insight and to challenge and prompt you to a deeper, more active, more meaningful prayer practice as I share learned ideas on how you can test and discern, in practical praying, ways to find God’s will and direction in all your life’s questions and decisions as the Scriptures have instructed us to do. In the various congregations I attended early in my life, surely there were those who spoke about this application of prayer and its invaluable practice, but I certainly didn’t pay any heed. And later, all by myself, I not only had to uncover its potential, but also its mechanism and manner of working through my own trials and errors.
As God was surely patiently waiting on me and then answered my very first and then second prayers, my lifted faith instantly realized the priceless importance of seeking out my Lord’s most superlative advice and direction. Who knows what’s best in any or all of my life’s enduring questions, especially important ones—me or God? I wasn’t even aware this avenue of prayer testing is actually mandated in Scripture. Later on in this writing, I will examine more closely God’s Inspired Word in the discussion of this testing of His will. Perhaps you yourself will be emboldened to share and encourage others to this extremely important process.