The one common thread through it all is that prayer is communication with God. In fact, that's the dictionary definition of Prayer: the act of communication with a deity.
To some, that definition doesn't come as much of a surprise, and maybe you were hoping for a more detailed and in depth exposition of what prayer is, but I think that there is a beauty in that simplicity...Prayer is communicating with God.
Sometimes I think we try and make Christianity more complicated than it actually is. We think we have to do certain things in a particular way in order to get God to like us and interact with us and we forget that God is gracious and in his grace he makes it easy to simply be with him and communicate with him. Prayer is simply communicating with God.
We live in a society infatuated with 'being connected'. Mobile phones, smart phones, iPhones, iPads, Blackberry's - all designed to allow us to stay in touch with emails, Facebook, Twitter, blogs constantly. But 'there is nothing new under the sun'. Before the first text was ever sent God had 24/7 connection sorted. Prayer is that constant connection. It's beautifully simple: you don't need the right handset or app, you don't need a decent enough signal, you don't need the right words or even know the fullness of your thoughts and feelings; God is ready, willing and available to scream at, rant at, laugh with, cry with, bounce ideas off, share secrets with. Just talk to him.
Sometimes, however, we bombard God with all our wants and needs and wishes as if he's some kind of genie in a bottle, but we forget to wait for a response. We don't give him a chance to reply.
Listening is as vital to communication as speaking is.
Yes we can pour out our hearts and thoughts and feelings and pains and joys - actually, it's a good thing to do and we should do that - but the blunt truth is that we're mission out on so much if we don't allow God a chance to respond.
That's why Jesus recommends going to your room, locking the door, and turning off your iPod, your blackberry, your laptop, your TV and any other distracting gadget, because it's quiet. It's not a place to help God speak. It's a place to help us hear. In that quiet place God speaks loudest. In the sound of silence we hear the delicate murmurings of Almighty God.
Prayer is communicating. (Now I'm not great at languages but stick with...) The word Communication comes from the Latin communicatus. On the one hand communicatus means 'to impart information', which is generally the way we understand communicating. But the Latin use of communicatus has notions of 'participating in' or 'joing/uniting with'. And with this is mind we can see that there is something more mysterious at play when we pray. Whether we're talking or God is talking there is another dimension to that activity.
There is a bigger Story than our own playing out all the time. God is redeeming his creation. He's bringing heaven to earth and bringing his kingdom to this world and our prayers are caught up in this story. (Romans 8:18-28). When we pray the Spirit of God - the third person of the Trinity, who is in his very essence God - joins with us in prayer [communicatus, imparting information, joining with, participating in, uniting with] and when we get to that point of saying "I'm finished, I'm empty, I've got nothing left; no words, no energy... but there's still so much I want to say" he says "I know what you mean, in fact, I know what you mean better than you know what you mean" and he carries our cries for us. Communicatus - united in prayer to the very Spirit of god to share in God's will. When we pray 'let your kingdom come and your will be done, because we want you to have your way God' he joins with us and says 'yeah, so do I'.
So, what is prayer? Prayer is an awesome, gifted means of simply sharing with our loving God. A way to offload our worries to him and share our highlights with him; to listen to him and learn from him.
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