Prayer: the medium and the object

"Many people (oddly enough) struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God." -Paul Miller

I have always been a doer, which makes doing nothing difficult.  Deep down I know praying isn't nothing, but often at the end of it I have nothing to "show."  When I read a chapter in a book, write a song, or do a Bible study I feel as if I have just done something.  But with prayer, it is a struggle.  Am I doing it right?  Did I pray long enough?  Was I focused or did my mind wander?  Was that time at all fruitful or was it a waste?

Prayer can be  hard and often frustrating.  This frustration led me to reading a book called "A Praying Life" by Paul E. Miller (We will be talking about some of the main points of the book in the coming blog posts).  When I read this quote it hit me.  There are a lot of good tips on prayer out there, but the first thing I must to do have a praying life is to focus on God, not on prayer.  This sounds so simple, but to me it was profoundly insightful.  It is so easy when we are struggling in a particular area of our Christian walk to run to methods on how that area can improve, instead of running to God and allowing him to penetrate our hearts and change us.

So I don't want to be a better prayer...I want to be a better lover.  I want to love Jesus more deeply, and this will be accomplished through prayer and a relationship.  So as we speak on prayer, let us not focus on the medium (prayer) but the object (God).