{"id":799660,"date":"2019-09-21T17:12:14","date_gmt":"2019-09-21T23:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=371875"},"modified":"2019-09-21T17:12:14","modified_gmt":"2019-09-21T23:12:14","slug":"walking-our-faith-how-do-we-know-if-god-is-listening-when-we-pray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/walking-our-faith-how-do-we-know-if-god-is-listening-when-we-pray\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking our Faith: How do we know if God is listening when we pray?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cO my Lord, make the world a better place. Help the people with stone hearts and make them pure with love. Hear my prayer, O Lord and help us to make sadness, happiness. Come to me, hear my prayer, love us endlessly and make us feel welcome in this big world. Amen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

As I left Saturday evening Mass at St. Mary\u2019s, Lauren Hammer stopped to say hello and shared the beautiful prayer above, written by her daughter, Veronica. It is a prayer filled with the optimism of youth and deep trust that God loves us and wants the best for us.<\/p>\n

Veronica\u2019s words got me thinking about prayer. My prayers range from the repetition of sacred words given to us by Jesus in the Our Father, where we are instructed to reach out to God not as a distant, unapproachable entity, but as Abba, Daddy, who we ask to provide our daily bread.<\/p>\n

Or the repetitions of the Hail Mary, as we say the rosary. Not mindless repetition, but a simple salutation that never fails to calm me as I reach out to the Mother of Jesus to share burdens which only a mother would understand.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps searching for God\u2019s presence in my life is like my autumn safari. I pray all the time. I pray when I\u2019m driving and when I\u2019m at church and when I\u2019m in bed. I pray intently and then look for signs that God has heard my prayers, that something has changed, that all these petitions that spill from my mouth or run through my mind have had some impact.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Last Sunday, I went for a walk in the woods to take pictures of the small signs of autumn, dandelion leaves that are now deep purple, rust-colored foxtail and vibrant yellow willows. Perhaps this week or next the hillsides around my home will be blanketed in gold, and I will make my annual pilgrimage over Boreas Pass with my dogs in the back of the car, riding beneath a canopy of quaking Aspen. <\/p>\n

But before I savor the magnitude of autumn\u2019s full splendor, I want to notice autumn in its infancy. The incremental changes. I want to catch each one, to appreciate this most visible evidence of the passage of time.<\/p>\n

Yet what I discovered was no matter how close my observation, when I turned around, I discovered the next day something I had missed. Leaves that overnight had turned from green to gold, patches on the hillside that had two days ago been chartreuse were suddenly gilded. How did I not notice? <\/p>\n

Perhaps searching for God\u2019s presence in my life is like my autumn safari. I pray all the time. I pray when I\u2019m driving and when I\u2019m at church and when I\u2019m in bed. I pray intently and then look for signs that God has heard my prayers, that something has changed, that all these petitions that spill from my mouth or run through my mind have had some impact.<\/p>\n

What I am really looking for is some sign God has heard me, that I matter, that I can affect some change in my life, when instead it feels as if I\u2019m pushing the wind. <\/p>\n

Sometimes, as with my experience this autumn, I turn and see things have changed, not by my own doing, and I wonder how I missed it, how I missed God\u2019s presence.<\/p>\n

At other times, I turn and as when I see the entire hillside covered in shimmering golden Aspen, I turn and see the tapestry of my life and it is only from that distant perspective I see that by God\u2019s grace, all the difficulties and joys and wrong choices and terrible mistakes all led me to this point and there is nowhere else I would rather be than here.<\/p>\n

And somehow, I understand that the thousands of prayers I recited during those desolate times, the prayers of thanksgiving I tossed toward Heaven in good times, the silence that broke my heart when I felt as if I could not go on without God\u2019s consolation, they were all threads in the tapestry of my life. They were the individual leaves of gold I captured with my camera, while I was unable to notice the forest that changed behind my back.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really understand how prayer works, but we all pray whether we know it or not. Even atheists pray, though I suspect they are not aware that their admonitions against the existence of God are actually their own soul\u2019s longing to be answered in the negative. We all pray because we can\u2019t help ourselves.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe the prayers I say when driving into town are any less sacred than the prayers I say when kneeling in a pew. I believe what matters to God is the sincerity of our hearts. Because God can see into our hearts even deeper than we, because he knows us better than we know ourselves, he understands our prayers more than we do, and as the Bible says, when we are at a loss for words, it is the Holy Spirit who interprets our groans and prays on our behalf.<\/p>\n

Let us continue to talk with God in all the ways that we know. In formal prayer, or as we walk through the woods enjoying God\u2019s good creation, in joyful thanksgiving, and in sorrowful pleas, let our hearts always be open to speaking with God, and to listening for his quiet reply. As Veronica prayed, I also pray we will discover God\u2019s ever present love for us.<\/p>\n

Suzanne Elizabeth Anderson\u2019s column Walking Our Faith publishes Saturdays in the Summit Daily News. Suzanne has written 10 novels and non-fiction books on faith, her latest novel is A Map of Heaven. She has lived in Breckenridge since 2016. You can reach her at suzanne@suzanneelizabeths.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cO my Lord, make the world a better place. Help the people with stone hearts and make them pure with love. Hear my prayer, O Lord and help us to make sadness, happiness. Come to me, hear my prayer, love us endlessly and make us feel welcome in this big world. Amen.\u201d As I left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-799660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-24 09:09:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}