Prayer actually has multiple purpose. Typically we think of prayer as asking
God to do something; once we pray we are attempting to move God to act. And
sometimes prayer will, in reality, serve this purpose. We sometimes will ask God
to have an active healing, and the man will heal. Sometimes we'll ask God for
food or clothing or rent money or mortgage money and He responds.
More frequently, though, we ask God to intervene inside our resides in our favor and He does not. As William Cowper writes, "Sometimes a light surprises a Christian while he sings" - sometimes, not often, and certainly not necessarily. Most of the objections I've read or learned about prayer think that the chief purpose for money prayers is to have God intervene on the behalf. And individuals understand that God doesn't always (as well as often) say, "Yes," to your prayers. So getting God to complete things for people is perhaps not sufficient reason to pray. It is not just a sufficient need to keep praying, because it doesn't consistently work.
But prayer can serve other purposes. Grief counselors tell us that the bereaved report that telling the storyline over and over as well as over again of how their cherished one died generally seems to ease the anguish of it. I haven't seen any research this phenomenon but neurologically it seems sensible. Neurologically, our brains store traumatic experiences, if they're sufficiently traumatic, separately from your all our memories. They aren't integrated with the rest of our brain. We all know that repeating a memory in a safe environment, a different context, softens hard edges of such neurological separations. It builds new connections in the brain between where those memories are stored and where the majority of our memories reside. Every time we remember, your brain encodes the traumatic event as slightly less painful, as the pain is re-saved to disc, so to speak, with all the added comfort of the safe environment in which we are remembering it. I believe that repeating our grief over and over and over again performs exactly that function for the brains.
So consider prayer within this context. God will be the ultimate safe audience, the Being of ultimate compassionate love. Repeating our cares and concerns to Him again and again softens the emotional impact of the cares and concerns. So one or more purpose in asking God for things would be to arrive at some level of internal comfort, whether or not our situations change.
Consider that organized religion and group prayer are social activities. Whenever we express the worries of our life to a group, and then individuals with the group, or perhaps the entire group, actually pray about our concerns, we're feeling validated. We discover other folks care about it is important to us. We get practice at (a minimum of) pretending that what's or worry to other people is important to us also. We must put on a minimum of the facade to be removed from entirely concentrating on our everyday life and caring about the life of others. Then one from the enormous advantages of acting a lot better than we're is the fact that sometimes, the acting contributes to reality.
More frequently, though, we ask God to intervene inside our resides in our favor and He does not. As William Cowper writes, "Sometimes a light surprises a Christian while he sings" - sometimes, not often, and certainly not necessarily. Most of the objections I've read or learned about prayer think that the chief purpose for money prayers is to have God intervene on the behalf. And individuals understand that God doesn't always (as well as often) say, "Yes," to your prayers. So getting God to complete things for people is perhaps not sufficient reason to pray. It is not just a sufficient need to keep praying, because it doesn't consistently work.
But prayer can serve other purposes. Grief counselors tell us that the bereaved report that telling the storyline over and over as well as over again of how their cherished one died generally seems to ease the anguish of it. I haven't seen any research this phenomenon but neurologically it seems sensible. Neurologically, our brains store traumatic experiences, if they're sufficiently traumatic, separately from your all our memories. They aren't integrated with the rest of our brain. We all know that repeating a memory in a safe environment, a different context, softens hard edges of such neurological separations. It builds new connections in the brain between where those memories are stored and where the majority of our memories reside. Every time we remember, your brain encodes the traumatic event as slightly less painful, as the pain is re-saved to disc, so to speak, with all the added comfort of the safe environment in which we are remembering it. I believe that repeating our grief over and over and over again performs exactly that function for the brains.
So consider prayer within this context. God will be the ultimate safe audience, the Being of ultimate compassionate love. Repeating our cares and concerns to Him again and again softens the emotional impact of the cares and concerns. So one or more purpose in asking God for things would be to arrive at some level of internal comfort, whether or not our situations change.
Consider that organized religion and group prayer are social activities. Whenever we express the worries of our life to a group, and then individuals with the group, or perhaps the entire group, actually pray about our concerns, we're feeling validated. We discover other folks care about it is important to us. We get practice at (a minimum of) pretending that what's or worry to other people is important to us also. We must put on a minimum of the facade to be removed from entirely concentrating on our everyday life and caring about the life of others. Then one from the enormous advantages of acting a lot better than we're is the fact that sometimes, the acting contributes to reality.
