"It is when we pray truly that we really are."

The power of prayer is great, a truth that I've been blessed to see at work a lot recently. During the Lenten Season, my church has joined together in 40 Days of Prayer. It's extremely inspiring knowing that there is an entire community praying alongside me, asking that the Lord continue to provide His guidance in our lives, to the church and to this city.

Thomas Merton offers a compelling and, for me, very meaningful perspective on prayer in the below passage. Sometimes I catch myself feeling guilty for coming to God with what seems like a laundry list of concerns and requests, when I'm already blessed in more ways than I can count. But life is just too complicated to think that I can handle it on my own - that was never His intention. And as Merton points out, knowing and acting on my incredible need for God's hand in my life is knowing Him... knowing myself.

“The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God... At the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God.
There is no such thing as a kind of prayer in which you do absolutely nothing. If you are doing nothing you are not praying.
Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need.
The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself, for he does not know his own need of God.
All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father.
It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this.”
-Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation