Prayer

Prayer

For my Practicum I chose sincere morning and evening prayer every single day. To be honest I was very tempted to break the honor code and just submit my practicum from last semester due to the amount of stress and the inability to accomplish my homework this week. On top of that, while I did well on it last semester, it seemed to not have a lasting effect in my life and would like to give it another shot. Ultimately I choose the right thing to do and decided to focus my efforts not only on something new, but something I feel impressed to focus on.

Now while I regularly say my morning prayers in the morning and do family prayer at night; I have horribly gotten out of the habit of a personal prayer at night and my morning prayer are often not very well thought out due to the hustle of rushing to work. Add a dash of laziness, stress, depression, mourning, and a whole lot of exhaustion and you have a recipe of someone coming up with a lot of excuses and has been a bad example to his family. I would like to add that I also chose this because I want to work on becoming meeker in life and I think the best path to that beyond studying is spending time on my knees speaking to the one person who I should show meekness to the most.

Summary:

We all have one thing in common and that we've missed being able to speaking to someone we hold dear. Regardless if it’s due to being in a long distance relationship, or maybe you've lost contact with a dear friend or family member for a countless amount of reasons, or worse yet have felt the sting of death in losing someone you love. We have all the felt the loneliness, the heartache, the absolute yearning to be near to our loved ones. We miss everything about them but most of all, we miss just being able to sit down and have a nice long conversation with them, even when it’s about nothing at all.

I would learn this all too well on March 16^th of 2014 when my mom passed away from a five plus month struggle with her body shutting down due to liver failure.  During this struggle my communication with my mom evaporated from a daily occurrence of speaking to her one to three times a day to not being able to speak to her again until after I return home to where my soul originated from. At the beginning of the end my communication with her spot being a daily occurrence to that of maybe every couple of day to maybe three times a week. She started to sleep all day and seem so very tired when I spoke to her, she didn't care about anything I had to say. Then she became more and more incoherent with less and less times of lucidity. Eventually all she ever did was sleep and I would be lucky to get an “I love you too son” or “don’t worry about me, I’m not dying”. By the time she was in the ICU there wasn't much left to her while I tried frantically to get just one last conversation between her and I. That last conversation never happened.

I’m an only child and the closest I've ever been with another person here on earth has been the relationship with my mom, not too discredit the sacred union between my wife and I, because I am working on making that the closest relationship. No matter what though, through thick and thin, the good, bad, the ugly, and the worst of it all, I’ve always had my mom and I could almost always come to her and talk about anything and everything or even nothing at all. These days I always make sure to talk to my father every day and panic every time I don’t hear from him or can't reach him. I know there will come a time when he too will go home, but in the meantime I don’t want to lose out on any opportunity to talk to him, even if it’s the same thing we talk about almost every day.

Now if only I felt the same exact way about speaking to my Father in Heaven right now in my life. There is good reason why I don’t and I am going to let a quote by Bruce C. Hafen explain what the reason is.

“One of the clearest—yet at times most perplexing—themes in the history of God’s dealings with mankind involves his decision to draw a veil between our world of mortality and his world of the eternities. Not only does the veil keep us from remembering our past, which we call the preexistence, but also it keeps us from seeing many things that are going on at the present—for God, his angels, and their activities are hidden from our sight.”

With the veil comes a forgotten relationship with our Father that is a double edged sword. On one end that forgetfulness is a blessing in disguise because if we all remembered just how intimate our relationship was, then I doubt many of us would be able to bare the separation from Him. If the loss of a loved one is any sort of indication of what the separation feels like, then I for one am glad not to feel it at this time. This principle applies also to repentance and staying faithful to the Gospel in order to come back home to Him and all those who you’ve missed while here on earth. The other side of the sword comes the ease it can give you to turn your back on God. To forsake a relationship you remember having and not realizing just how deep, intimate, and sacred that relationship is. This is why prayer is so important.

While there is plenty to learn while here on earth, one of the few things you are never really learning is your relationship to your Father in Heaven. You can only remember it and have that relationship revealed to you as you slowly tear away at that veil. And that process is called Personal Revelation and prayer is an essential key in order to receive it. I will let Elder L. Lionel Kendrick explain the process in detail.

“To pray is to have a conversation with Deity. This sacred and supernal communication with Heavenly Father is a divine and delicate process. This crucial communication should be conducted with great care and in compliance with sacred counsel.

Pray often. To receive personal revelation requires a constant, concentrated effort in which we continue to petition Heavenly Father about our concerns. We cannot become casual in our communications with Him. To do so is to ignore the counsel to “trifle not with sacred things” (D&C 6:12). We must follow the counsel to “pray unto him continually by day, and give thanks unto his holy name by night” (2 Ne. 9:52). It is not the duration of our prayers but the depth of our desire that results in revelation.

Ponder before you pray. The Savior counseled, “Study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right” (D&C 9:8). The Prophet Joseph Smith was pondering the meaning of John 5:29, concerning the Resurrection. He said, “And while we meditated upon these things, the Lord touched the eyes of our understandings and they were opened” (D&C 76:19).

We must ponder before we pray. We must study, meditate, and seek for enlightenment concerning the matters for which we seek personal revelation.

Ask for the right things. We must be careful that we ask for that which is right. The Savior counsels that we should “not ask for that which you ought not” (D&C 8:10). He warns, “And if ye ask anything that is not expedient for you, it shall turn unto your condemnation” (D&C 88:65).

Avoid vain repetitions. The Savior has counseled that “when ye pray, use not vain repetitions” (3 Ne. 13:7; see also 3 Ne. 19:24). Our individual prayers should not be rote recitations; they should be personal in nature and not preset presentations. We should express our thoughts and feelings in a heartfelt way. President Harold B. Lee counseled: “The most important thing you can do is to learn to talk to God. Talk to Him as you would talk to your father, for He is your Father, and He wants you to talk to Him. He wants you to cultivate ears to listen, when He gives you the impressions of the Spirit to tell you what to do.” 4

Ask in faith. Prayers of faith are heard and answered. The Savior gave a powerful promise concerning the power of faith in our prayers: “And whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you” (3 Ne. 18:20).

Ask in humility. Our communications with Heavenly Father must be done with great humility. This is a form of reverence and respect for Deity. It is submitting our will to His will. The Savior said, “Be thou humble; and the Lord thy God shall lead thee by the hand, and give thee answer to thy prayers” (D&C 112:10).

Praying with great humility is essential if our prayers are to be heard and answered. The Savior has given a warning to all who forget the importance of the principle of humility: “For although a man may have many revelations, and have power to do many mighty works, yet if he boasts in his own strength, and sets at naught the counsels of God, and follows after the dictates of his own will and carnal desires, he must fall and incur the vengeance of a just God upon him” (D&C 3:4).

Ask in sincerity. If we are to receive personal revelation, we must petition Heavenly Father with the sincerity of our soul. If we are not serious about the things we ask, He will not bless us with answers to our prayers. Mormon cautioned, “And likewise also is it counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such” (Moro. 7:9).

Ask with intensity. Enos is a great example of one who prayed with great intensity. He wanted more than anything else to be forgiven of his sins. He described his desire and the level of intensity of his prayer: “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (Enos 1:4).

Mormon counseled, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart” (Moro. 7:48).

To pray intently and with energy of heart involves focusing with faith on your conversation with Heavenly Father. It also involves closing out the world as if only you and He are present during this divine discussion.

Wait for answers. In a world of instant communication, we are prone to become impatient and want instant answers to our prayers. God always answers prayers, but He does it in His own way and in His own time. Perhaps it is wise to remember this counsel: “Be still and know that I am God” (D&C 101:16).”

To add to this and a key in our relationship with our Father is being meek, Neal A. Maxwell said it best when he said the following.

“Meekness constitutes a continuing invitation to continuing education. No wonder the Lord reveals His secrets to the meek, for they are "easy to be entreated" (Alma 7:23). Not only are the meek more teachable, but they continuously receive, with special appreciation, "the engrafted word" (James 1:21), as the apostle James said—and, as Joseph Smith described it, the pure flow of intelligence (see Teachings, p. 151)—all from the divine databank.”

I want to be taught, I want to have this relationship I know I already have if I can just remember it, cultivate it, and help it to grown into something more and all I need to do is have a daily conversation with my Father in Heaven, and mean it.

Action Plan:

My goal will be to increase my personal prayers to two plus daily, they being meaningful and given adequate time for communication.

I will keep a prayer journal documenting the number of personal prayers in day and any specifics spoken about or impressions given while in prayer or in response to prayer. IF there isn't any prayer in that day then the only thing that will be on that days page is the date, the rest will be blank as a symbol of what I lost out on.

I will measure my success or failure on a day by day basis, by the amount of blank pages versus those with something in them no matter how little. I will also measure out my success based off of my influence on my family and the growth or lack thereof in the relationship with my Father.