Prayer - Making It Useful

Prayer is simply the communication between us and God. We commonly say that prayer is powerful, but we never look into what makes it so powerful.

All of us know how to sit down and ask God for things. In my opinion, however, what makes prayer actually powerful is the time we spend listening to Gods reply. I would bet that most of us are terrible at that listening so lets look at a couple ways we can pay attention.

Signs
They have to be included as a answer to prayer because they do happen. However, like in the movies, I think constantly asking for one tends to make you look like a jerk... especially when you happen to ignore it anyway.

Gut Feeling
It's almost funny how we can sit in a situation and ask for 'guidance' when we have a burning instinct to do something. We have the ability to tell right from wrong so lets try choosing the right every once in a while. So next time you make your prayer, quiet yourself and ask what it is that you are driven to do. Denial plays a big role in obstructing this method. The answer is right there, but we are either afraid or don't want to believe that it's that simple.

Dreams (Meditation)
This is the method I use a lot... and I'm including meditation in it because my meditation is always image based. The problem that dream interpretation has over something like the gut feeling is that the message has to be correctly interpreted. I would go on to say that the solution is simply picking a dream interpretation book or website and telling God that that's the reference you'll be using... most of them are fairly similar though... I like dreammoods.com because of it's modern references and use of color and numbers.... the search function is very good as well.