Expressing Dependence

I cannot remember living without praying.  It is true enough to say that those first prayers were simple; perhaps, they could be thought of as primitive, but mostly they were about me.  In those early boyhood days of learning to pray by doing it, I became quite proficient at letting God know what I thought He needed to do.  Praying back then was mostly about God helping me stay out of trouble after I had gotten into trouble, or getting something I thought I needed in order to live.  Hopefully, praying has moved to a different level at this stage of my life, but as is always the case, old habits are hard to break.   

Our prayer lives surely have an evolving and growing dimension as we journey on the road of faith in Christ.  Even as our understanding of God changes, so does our praying.  Hopefully, as the years begin to add up, we cease seeing Him as some holy Santa Claus dressed in white instead of red who will give to us not according to our needs, but our wants.  The Scripture does encourage us to pray and to pray about any and everything, but I sometimes wonder if I am not wasting God's time by asking for a parking place close to the entrance to the grocery store when there are so many people suffering from hunger.  

In his book, "No Man is an Island," Thomas Merton wrote, "All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death...It is when we pray truly that we really are...When we cease to pray, we tend to fall back into nothingness."  Merton's words resonate as truth for many of us.  As we grow in our understanding of the nature of God and what prayer is all about, we begin to see ourselves praying not so much because there are things we need or want from God, but because we know that without Him in our life, life would amount to a huge ball of nothingness.  To say, "Our Father," is first of all an acknowledgement that we need Him and maybe that is indeed the most important thing to be expressed in the prayer of our heart.