Let me share what a friend shared about how he learned "how to pray."
The first time I ever tried to pray, I was 18 years old. I was doing a lot of searching at that time in my life: searching, searching for myself, searching for my place in the world. But most particularly, I was searching for God, whether or not he existed, and if he existed, who he was and what he wanted for me. And so I got it in my head that if I wanted to figure out who God was and what he wanted, I should just ask him. So I decided one night to try and pray. And I'd only ever seen people really praying on TV when they would sit and kneel at their bed and fold their hands and pray. So I get down on my knees, I folded my hands to pray. And I got there, and I had no idea what to do next. I had all the desire to pray, all the desire to talk to God, but I had no clue what to say. It wasn't like God had a telephone number I could just call him up and be like, "Hey, I want to talk to you. Are you real? What do you want from me?" It was far more awkward.
I did that for about a year, to be honest. Every night, before I went to bed, I would kneel down at my bed, fold my hands, and search for the words to describe what was going on in my mind, in my heart. And then about a year into doing this, I read Rediscover Catholicism. And in that book, Matthew has this line where he says, "The Bible is the greatest treasury of prayer. When I am weak, when I am lost, when I am uncertain, when I don't know what to say, I turn to the Psalms." And so that's what I did. I got an old family Bible, I opened it up to the first Psalm, and I prayed the Psalm. And I did this every single night. And it was the Psalms who taught me how to pray. They gave me the words, they gave me the praise, they gave me all that I needed to learn how to talk to God and share what was going on in the deepest parts of my heart. And it totally changed my life.
So if I could go back to my 18-year-old self and give one piece of advice getting started in prayer, I would say go to the greatest treasury of prayer there is. Go to the Psalms. And the Psalms will teach you how to pray.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we learn to pray and humbly ask the Big Question: “What do you think I should do?
