Quotes about Prayer

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

TO BE GRATEFUL for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.

The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).

It is then I face a momentous decision. Shivering in the rags of my seventy-four years, I have two choices. I can escape below into skepticism and intellectualism, hanging on for dear life. Or, with radical amazement, I can stay on deck and boldly stand in surrendered faith to the truth of my belovedness, caught up in the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God. And learn to pray.

In prayer Jesus slows us down, teaches us to count how few days we have, and gifts us with wisdom. He reveals to us that we are so caught up in what is urgent that we have overlooked what is essential. He ends our indecision and liberates us from the oppression of false deadlines and myopic vision.

From that moment on, no Christian can ever say one form of prayer is as good as another or one religion is as good as another.

When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I conclude that I can now cope with the awful love of God, I have headed for the shallows to avoid the deeps. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.

Prayer is simply relaxing and delighting in Jesus with no agenda except celebrating the deep affection between you. This interpersonal encounter deepens the sense of our own belovedness and alters our relationships with others.

The cardinal rule in prayer remains the dictum of Don Chapman: "Pray as you can; don't pray as you can't.

For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather a school of love and prayer to learn to enter more deeply into humanity. Their goal was to shout the gospel not so much with their mouths as with their lives.

In the next few minutes, I prayed with her for healing. Then I asked her if she would find a quiet place every morning for the next thirty days, sit down in a chair, close her eyes, upturn her palms, and pray this one phrase over and over: ABBA, I BELONG TO YOU.

What I created today was a god, but it was not You. Forgive this sin of mine, I pray.