I would like to be better about this. Especially as summer approaches and I no longer have long periods of enforced silence like my drive back from work, I would like to find some way to better include prayer in my daily routine. Often, I find my mind wandering when I should be praying, or rushing to get the prayer over with as I worry so often about lost time. I know that this ties back in with my own doubts about my faith.
Many are the times when I feel nothing from my prayer. I wonder if that nothing that I feel is because I am praying to nothing, or that there was something about my prayer that was lacking, that it was not deserving of a response, that the lack of response WAS the response, or that my doubts and fears clouded my thoughts and prevented me from hearing the response.
There are times, however, where I most certainly receive a response. In some cases it is a message on a billboard, bumper-sticker (remember that a lot of my prayers are when driving) or something else that I happen to read or hear. In some cases it is a feeling of growing warmth throughout my body, a shiver down my spine, or like something poured a cool lotion on the base of my neck that slowly spreads itself through my person. In some cases it is a distinct voice (sounding a lot like my own internal voice) that answers the question or statement that I had posed.
Are these responses actual responses, or are they coincidences, bio-chemical reactions, neurological phenomena, or just something imagined? I know enough about the placebo effect and other such experiences to know that our minds are quite capable of fooling ourselves. I have also seem people go into rapturous states from a variety of other religious prayers, and even non-religious events such as concerts and even mobs, to wonder about the validity of my responses to MY prayers from MY God.
With all of this doubt of my own experiences with my faith, I try to be more understanding of people who are of other faiths and of no faith at all. Yet my tolerance in this regard has been sorely tested lately. A number of people (even friends and family) have (verbally, in writing or through actions) attacked the idea of prayer, especially people who pray for others. They see people praying for others as a violation of people's freedom of religion (that freedom of religion should now be freedom FROM religion). Ironically, it is the people complaining (and their ignorance of people's intentions) about prayer who are turning me more towards it. Perhaps it's just my contrary nature (actually that most likely is a large portion of my rationale), but any attack on my religion tends to highlight the ways that the people attacking are in the wrong.
Still, a growth in prayer out of retaliation for other people's unbelief isn't much of a prayer. I really don't know. I suppose that I need to pray about this more.