In my understanding, God has always given us everything in advance, an abundance of everything, and is never apart from us. When I pray, I don’t think of trying to influence a God out there somewhere to do something for me. God is present right where I am whether I feel it or not.

Addressing God in prayer, then, is more a way to open me, to help me to receive God’s love in whatever way my limited consciousness can. When I confess my longings, my failures, and my efforts as well as my needs and joys, I become more transparent. I can feel, then, that God is in relationship to me as I am in relationship to God. This is not magical hoping to be spared pain and suffering. It is more a growing experience of the bottomless compassion that God is, and so a desire to participate in that compassion emerges in the situations I find myself in.

I know that of my own self I can do nothing, but the love that has already been given to me in abundance can infuse me, change me, reassure me, and support me. The act of praying opens the door to my heart and to ways to live more faithfully and fruitfully.

We have the limitations of our bodies and our circumstances. But within them lie vast possibilities of acceptance and growth. We can learn to embody love, peace, forgiveness, and presence. For me, prayers are the keys that can help unlock our resistance and allow Spirit to govern and guide us.

The bigger picture will always be unknown to us, and yet we are intrinsic parts of the picture. I believe we can trust that the longing in our hearts will move us more and more into companionship with God and so to those rightful places for us to live and serve.

We can write prayers, sing our prayers, hum them, say them in silence, and reach out with our hands and arms to move them as wordless expressions of our hearts. With prayer as a relationship, we are opened to an inner, living relationship with God in which many things become possible. To be in and about care is one of them.