Prayer like water

I ran across a blog post by Lorna of see through faith a couple of days ago. It is called Barriers, and it is about the barriers that we find that seem to block our way to being a prayerful people. I wanted to pull out a couple of really good lines:

...the church of today (that’s you and me by the way!) is powerless because of our prayerlessness.

Jesus didn’t say if you pray, he said when you pray.

It starts with us recognising that there is a huge barrier to be overcome in our lives (not only in the lives of them out there!) and that barrier is complacency.
I've been working on a Sunday school lesson for tomorrow called "Prayer Makes a Difference" based on 1 Samuel 7:3-13. The theme of that lesson is to look at the conditions and causes of people's return to God.

Part of what I have prepared to talk about tomorrow is to examine the hindrances to turning to God. I think Lorna is right -- complacency is a big one.

• Everything is OK now; there really is no need to make any changes.
• It's not great, but we can't do any better than this, so let's just be glad for the way it is.
• Nobody wants to make any changes, so why bother?

I read in Ortberg's book that in order for change or growth to occur in a church, the members have to have an optimism or a hope that the church of tomorrow will be better than the church of today. Do we have that? Does your congregation have that belief? Without it, why bother?

Prayer. How do we know if it will make a difference unless we do it? Are the events at your church, at my church, supported by prayer? I said a couple of days ago that 95% of what a church does can be done without God. If we want to change that, if we want to involve God in what we do, how do we do it?

What's our move to involve God? My favorite line from the teacher's book this week, which isn't actually from 1 Samuel is this one:

Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord (Lamentations 2:19)

I think that's a wonderful description of prayer. It's what we need to do. My question of the last few days is HOW.

Images: Ritter Park and geranium on VA grounds