This morning, as I pray for people I know who are experiencing crisis, I am more grateful than ever for what prayer is and what prayer is not.
Prayer is not the work of attempting to convince an aloof deity to act on our behalf, as though God were a cruel spectator in need of persuasion.
Quite the contrary, the work of prayer is a mystical participation in the good and redemptive activity in which God already longs to engage—far more than we do, in fact.
Such prayer is never wasted. Never. It always becomes a supernatural conduit through which the Holy Spirit travels into the hearts and circumstances of the ones praying and the ones for whom prayer is being offered.
I am believing that today with an added sense of urgency.
(Artwork: "Praying" by Dorina Costras)