Prayer: Make it Meaningful

Dear Heavenly Father thank you for my many blessings…    Lets try this again. Dear Heavenly Father thank you for the home you have provided me, for the loving family that I am able to speak with daily.  We all can find many blessings in our lives, but by thanking Heavenly Father with this broad term we can get ourselves into a prayer rut.

 Sadly, I have recently learned this. Satan has crept in and convinced me that the little things aren’t important. It is ok to skip scripture study for the day or to skip prayer.  I hated this feeling and I wanted to find out what I could do to change it. So I prayed to Heavenly Father to help me.  I kept getting this feeling that I needed to make my prayers more meaningful.  I felt that I was doing what was asked of me. I said morning and evening prayer every single day, but at the end of my prayer I didn’t feel much.

  What I have come to realize is we can get stuck in a rut. We can say our prayers out loud, but not really say them with meaning. Every day I prayer for my young women, but I never feel like I received guidance on how to help them. Once I broke down my prayers line by line I realized if I needed help with a young woman then I needed to pray for her by name or I pray for the youth to receive something specific. For example I pray that the young women will be able to feel the spirit today while at school and remain strong against temptation.  

  We all have been guilty at some point of saying prayers over and over again. When we pray at meal times we often say, “Please bless this food that it will strengthen and nourish our bodies.” How can we make this more meaningful. While we surely appreciate the meal that was prepared, did we really feel the Spirit during that prayer? While I do not have all the answers as I am still working on this myself. I wanted to share the thought that prayer is so incredibly important. It is how we speak to our Heavenly Father. We can’t speak to our spouse using the same terms and sentences daily while expecting to keep that relationship going. Our Heavenly Father is not much different. While He will always hear our prayers we need to feel the spirit when we say them. We need to ask and pray for specific things. If we want to keep our relationship open with Heavenly Father we need to be able to talk to Him freely and share the details of what we need. I have a strong testimony of prayer. I know that He hears us and wants to help us. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ.