Prayer Opens Up Connection

What I Receive From Prayer

When I was younger my grandfather taught me “Now I lay me, down to sleep…” and I still say that prayer every night, it has just been added onto quite a bit over the years. I view this prayer as my ‘protection prayer’. Though, my prayer life is so much more spectacular than that since implementing Step 11 into my daily life! Honestly, it took five years of pain in my recovery to really surrender to working this step on a daily basis:

"Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out."

And during those five years of surface-working a program of recovery and not practicing the 11^th step daily, most of my prayers to God were like this: “God, why!?!!!” or “I’m so mad at you God!”. I lacked in faith and ran on self-will fumes.

Now, my prayers usually look like this:

“God, help. I’m going through this…”

“God, I know I can only see the threads, but could you please reveal more of the tapestry…”

“God, please send light and love to such and such person…”

“God, please show me how to be loving here.”

“God, I need to talk…”
"God, thank you!"
"God, allow me to be like an open vessel for your love because..."

I have found that, for me, there is no wrong way to pray. Prayer works in any way. It opens me up and allows me to be absolutely vulnerable and authentic in my life. It keeps me accountable and helps walk me to my own door instead of peeking through the windows of everyone else to see what they do or do not have. Prayer releases my most soulful emotions and helps empowers me to brave!

Prayer to my Higher Power (which I choose to call an all-loving God) has given me a beautiful permission-the ability to see and truly accept my light and my dark. I can accept all of my facets and empower myself through knowing that I am an imperfect child of an all perfect, loving God who absolutely hears, teaches, cares and loves me.
 

I am curious, how does prayer work for you in your life?