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BY STACEY COLE WILSON

Our God in heaven, reveal who you are. Set the world right; do what’s best — as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You’re in charge! You can do anything you want! You’re ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.
Matthew 6:9-13, The Message

Come away with me for a few moments to a place, a centering place where God has our undivided attention. Feel free to pray with your eyes wide open or tightly shut, on bended knee, prostrate on the floor, while standing or sitting. Our physical position is not more important than the posture of our hearts and through prayer God seeks to exchange our hearts for the heart of God.

Are you ready to come away to a place where your soul can touch God’s hand and be restored? There is a portal to God right where you are. Regardless of your gender, status, denomination, political beliefs or affiliations, God wants to talk with you. God is ready for a life-changing conversation that can begin with a simple hello.

While in this sacred place, through prayer, discern God’s will for your life, for God’s ministry, for building relationships. Lift up words of comfort and renewal for those with broken hearts to be mended and wounds to be made whole. Present the vulnerable and the powerful on your spiritual altar right where you are before your God. Request spiritual direction and discernment for leaders of the nations and for those who seek peace within them. Advocate for the freedoms of those held captive and pray for those who advocate for the freedom of others. Speak forth prayers for forgiveness, repentance, thanksgiving, for your enemies, for your friends. Then say, Lord, I trust you and release these people and things to your hands.

Beloved, prayer is a powerful gift. It is two-way conversation with God. There is time to speak and time to contemplate or meditate upon that which God has shared. In prayer there is time for both discernment and dialogue.

For the Christian, it is an instant acknowledgement of God’s ability to be reached anywhere at anytime. It is a portal to the healing, sustaining, redeeming and restoring God that says God is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all I can imagine, ask or think, but God needs me to take the journey. God needs humanity to want to worship God. Prayer is a place of surrender.

Throughout the Bible, there are incredible stories of persons who have found great solace and strength in conversations with God. But, for me, the greatest of all of the stories chronicled is the one of Jesus praying for himself, for those yet born, and his model of prayer left for his followers. Knowing that Jesus needed time to pray tells me that there is no way to accomplish God’s work without it.

As a child, I remember praying for my grandfather on his bed of affliction to live and not die. He died not long after my prayer and I wondered why God, the Giver of Life, did not choose to let him live. God responded, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. …Because I live, he will live also (John 14:7). I was told that my grandfather was with God. And slowly as the days, weeks and years passed, my tears ceased and my heart was comforted in the fact that he still lives on in my heart and that he has a life with God.

I have many stories of God answering prayer in unconventional and conventional ways. Take the time to reflect upon how God has answered your prayers (and note the answered prayers of others around the world). People prayed for the end of apartheid, thanks be to God. That geographical stronghold has ended. People prayed for the end of the Rwandan genocide. People prayed for the end of segregation in the Americas. People prayed for the end of the Holocaust. People continue to pray for the end of human trafficking and other evils around the world. We shall not cease to pray and advocate for every sickness and disease. Again, there are spiritual and physical fronts on which to communicate/pray, but we shall not fail to do our part to let freedom ring in the physical realm and call on our God for solutions in the spiritual realm.

Daily, people are experiencing the wonders of God. But, for those who have yet to see it, let the words of Daniel 9:20-23 encourage you — these words helped me to understand that delayed prayers are not always denials They taught me prayer is not about getting what we want. It is about getting to a better understanding of God’s vision and person that is being revealed to us.

"To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing."

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King

"Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you."

- Augustine of Hippo

Rev. Stacey Cole Wilson is pastor of Mt. Winans UMC in Baltimore.