THE JOLLEY JOURNALS - PRAYER

Posts have been sparse this week, due to the fact that I only had 4 days to prepare a talk for sacrament meeting. My topic was the power of prayer. I thought that I would share a few excerpts with you:

I asked several friends, "What is prayer?" Here are two of my favorite answers.

“Prayer is a daily PPI. It is an opportunity to talk with God and reflect on what I can do better tomorrow.”

“Prayer is a way to open your heart to God, let him in your life in an intimate way, and tell him all your fears and worries, gratitude and thankfulness. Prayer is one of those things that is experienced differently by everyone but is a universal way of talking to the one who created each of us!”

.......................

President Kimball taught: “No mother would carelessly send her little children forth to school on a wintry morning without warm clothes to protect against the snow and rain and cold. But there are numerous fathers and mothers who send their children to school without the protective covering available to them through prayer—a protection against exposure to unknown hazards, evil people, and base temptations.”

We are taught to “pray always to the Father in my name.”

Once a Primary teacher asked a little boy if he said his prayers every night.

“Yes,” he replied.

“And do you always say them in the morning, too?” the Primary teacher asked.

“No,” the boy replied. “I ain’t scared in the daytime.”

Fear of the dark should not be our only motivation to pray.

............................

We sometimes forget that prayer should not be our last resort, but our first priority.

President Hinckley said, “Believe in prayer and the power of prayer. Pray to the Lord with the expectation of answers. I suppose there is not a man or a woman in this entire congregation today who doesn’t pray. I hope that is so. The trouble with most of our prayers is that we give them as if we were picking up the telephone and ordering groceries- we place our order and hang up. We need to meditate, contemplate, think of what we are praying about and for and then speak to the Lord as one man speaketh to another. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord” (Isa. 1:18). That is the invitation. Believe in the power of prayer- it is real, it is wonderful, it is tremendous.”

My testimony of prayer is that it is real and that God hears and answers our prayers. Prayer changes who we are and what we will become. "Prayer changes things."