Prayer

Are you Praying….or INTENTIONALLY Praying?

I have recently come to realize that there is a difference between praying and intentionally praying.  You may say, “What’s the difference?”  First off, when you say, “I’m going to pray for you,” do you really do it?  I use to say this to people that would say they needed prayers for a loved one, for a difficult situation they were facing, having problems with their family or children, whatever the situation may be, and I would only occasionally pray for that person.  If I did pray for that person it would be in a “generalized” form.  After attending a conference and having a speaker say “I knew who was intentionally praying for me, by the way they acted around me or by what they did for my husband and myself” did I realize that I was not being intentional about my prayers.  Being intentional, means that if you say you are going to pray for someone, you honestly pray for them and you are specific in your praying.  Example: I don’t only pray for someone with cancer to have God lay his healing hands upon that person and the doctors that are treating that person, I ask for the cancer to go away, for God to heal that person the way “HE” wants them to be healed.  Sometimes that is letting them “GO HOME” so they have no more pain, NO more cancer. Is that truly what I want for them-in a way because I do want the pain to go away, for the cancer to go away.  I have learned that God does answer all prayers, maybe not the way WE think they should be answered, but they are answered in the way GOD wants them to be answered.  I also pray for the family of that person that they may have strength, courage, guidance and understanding. I also have found that I pray for them sometimes several times throughout the day.  I also will receive a message or news of someone needing to be lifted up in prayer for a variety of reasons and again I would think yep, I need to remember to pray for them tonight when I go to bed.  I now stop what I’m doing at the time of the news and just say a little prayer for them right then.  It does not have to be in your bed at night time, during a quiet part of the day, when no one else is around or on your knees in a church, you can pray wherever you are at.  That’s the most amazing part.  God is always available to listen, no matter where we are, what we are doing or who may be with us at that time. I have prayed at work, driving my van somewhere, on the couch when I get a message, in the middle of doing dishes and many other times.  I know it has made a huge change on how I go about my praying and even how I look at helping others in their time of need.

So are you praying or INTENTIONALLY praying?

From the desk of Pauline