On Prayer

Prayer is something I have always struggled with when trying to lead a fairly Christian life. I still have troubles with it even now, but am starting to realize the great power in prayer. I now certainly believe that prayers are heard by God and answered... even if the answer is sometimes "no." Even when I was not attending church at all, I would still pray from time to time. But now as I'm getting involved again, I'm trying to pray on a more regular basis.

I find that I either forget to pray as I cannot seem to schedule myself to do it or when I am praying, I get distracted with other thoughts and sometimes fall asleep. I am working on it, but it will take some time before I can probably do it completely focused. So one more thing to ask is better focus in my prayers.

One thing I love about the Catholic church is the ability to pray to the saints. I guess it's not just being Catholic that gives one the ability to pray to the saints, but protestants generally don't believe in praying to anyone other than God/Christ/Holy Spirit. And just for the record, as a Catholic we don't ask the saints for our prayers, we ask them to intercede to Christ on our behalf. It's like asking a friend to pray for you. The thing about saints is they're already in heaven and they already kind of have an "in" with God.

And we don't worship Mary. We hold her in high esteem and show adoration to her. After all, she is the mother of Christ. And who better to intercede on our behalf, but the one who is closest to Christ? I made my own rosaries a while back and prayed it a few times, but got out of the habit as I got "busy." I'm going to try to start praying it more though. I find that when I have prayed the rosary, my day seems to go better and life is just more calm.

I know that some people probably don't care for the fact that the rosary is a series of repetitious prayers (Hail, Mary's and Our Father's), but it's really more of a meditative state when you can really focus on the greatness of Christ. It is still a little awkward, but like I said, I find that things are less stressful for me when I've taken the time to do it.