For me, I don't consciously pray....I just kind of think about things, knowing that it is God who is going to privide me with the right answers.....the answers that I need to make the right decisions. Those answers don't come quickly.....some take a lot of time to be answered, & some the answers come more quickly. The come in the form of thoughts in my own mind & I know they aren't something I put there because I start out not knowing at all what to do. When it becomes clear to me, that is when I know that my questions (prayers) have been answered by God. I find that he makes pathways clear to follow & they are obvious that they are pathways set there by God because I in my most organized, intelligent mind couldn't make things happen the way they do in my life.

This has become my way of communicating with God, & I always seem to get the answers to guide me in the right direction....or the right things happen in my life that guide the right results.

The one problem I had with prayer was when my Mother was Dx'ed with vulvar cancer....a rare cancer that in found in only about 3000 women in the US each year. She has been a strong Lutheran Christian most of her life. When she learned of the cancer, she prayed to got to heal her & she said that all her friends & church friends were praying for her also. As her condition got worse, I was continually being bombarded with her question of when it God going to make me better. God gave me the wonderful surgeon (the guy was a complete jerk) to save my life. When am I going to get better because everyone is praying for me to get better. I was in a tough place because I knew in my heart that she was dying even though the Dr's weren't supporting that fact. Finally one night when I was with her at the end, I had to go into the medical hospital myself & knew that by the time I would be released, she wouldn't be alive, I took her hands & told her that God was answering her prayers, he just wasn't answering them the way she wanted him to answer. I told her that God was going to heal her when she let go & quit hanging onto life here on earth & that he had a place there in heaven for her next to my Dad. She could no longer talk & was barely hanging on, but I felt a light squeeze, knowing that she heard me.

I left to go to the hospital to get treated for the massive weight loss I had from all the stress I was going through. I got a call the next morning that my Mother had died about 2 hours after I left.

Sometimes we don't want to hear the answers God has for us....sometimes we are afraid of those answers because it is the unknown & we can't believe that would be the answer because that wasn't what we asked for. I have learned from that experience that what I need to ask for is to be given the answer in my mind so that I know what the answer is. Not praying for specific things, but for the knowledge of what I need to do or what I should know so that I can either do the right thing or make the right decision so that the right thing can happen in my life. It has taken a long time to realize that this is the way I need to talk to God.

It is a personal thing & we all have to learn our own way to communicate so that we can understand the answers he gives us....in thoughts in our minds & knowing it is the right thing, or sometimes there are signs or something happens so that we know in our minds & thoughts what we need to do. It's taken me 54 years to realize that the thoughts I am given are usually Gods answers to my prayers.

Debbie