Prayer is lifting something up to a God Who had the answer before I knew I had the problem.

It was in learning to pray for you that I finally began to discover the richness that I missed for all of the years that I wasn’t praying for you. But the prayer of my prayers is not that this richness would rest with me, but that it would be transferred in the fullness of it to you.

Being alert is not to vigilantly stand on tip-toe in order to scan some distant horizon out of the fear of some approaching enemy. Quite the opposite. It is falling to our knees knowing that God is already out on that horizon and that He thwarted the enemy long before they ever reached it.

Do not be fooled. Passive prayers hastily tossed out as some second-thought appeasement at those junctures when life’s more pressing duties benevolently grant us a moment of reprieve are nothing of prayer. Real prayer is first realizing the fact that prayer ‘is’ the pressing duty. And second, that real prayer is doggedly pushing everything else aside to deliberately act on that fact.

The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less.

Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.

Prayer is knowing that what I ask for is always far bigger than what I could ever articulate, but it is never too big for God to understand nor is it ever too vast for Him to deliver.

To ascend the mountain, we must descend to our knees.

You may force me to quit you. And because you ask it or demand it of me, whatever it might be, I will respectfully comply. But quitting you does not mean that I have quit praying that you will not quit yourself, for there is a strong likelihood that that is what you quit before you quit me.