Petition: Casting Your Cares on Him Having risen in praise and thankfulness, then you pray for yourself, for the people in your life, and for the things you are facing that day. Declare your dependence upon God, asking him to remove all fear and to fill you with his love for your life and all that enters it.

The Day Dawns: Rising with Praise, Petition, and Planning.

Kneel for five or ten minutes and welcome the presence of Jesus. You may not think it will make any difference to kneel when you pray, but try it anyway. Then consider the difference it may have made. As you pray, give the day up to God, renewing your invitation to him to be with you each moment.

Prayer, it is rightly said, is the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is.

Train yourself to use each change of person or event to remind you to pray and to bless, so that mere change becomes a signal to turn your mind back to God.

Giving is not the same as imposition. That is why God does not just give us what we need without being asked. Prayer is nothing but a proper way for persons to interact.

So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request.

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love.

That is one reason it is hard to get people to pray at church and why prayer meetings are often dead. People don't see that prayer—real, two-way conversation with God—makes any difference.

Nowhere is it more important to be in a conversational relationship with God than in our prayer life.

He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.

This time of reflection should also include thanksgiving for all the ways the day went well.