I talk with God a lot.  I mean a lot.  It wasn’t always that way, though.  Prayer used to seem like a chore.  I often didn’t remember to pray, and when I did, it felt either like an afterthought or a forced obligation.  I didn’t pray out loud because my prayers seemed inadequate to my own ears. I didn’t feel close to God when I prayed.  Two things changed all this for me.

My battle with depression has been a long one, and I will always need to be vigilant to make sure I never let it get as bad as it did at one point in my life.   Postpartum hormones combined with PTSD (a story for a future post) had resulted in torturous nightmares each and every night. I fought sleep for eight months to avoid dreaming while I tried to work through this problem on my own. I had reached the point where I thought I would not be able to go on. Suicide became an option to my fatigued mind.  I was seriously considering it, but I knew from experience that suicide doesn’t end the pain; it only passes it on to those left behind. This was my darkest, most frightening moment.  I had fought with all I had and it wasn’t enough.  I cried out desperately to God for help.  It was a simple prayer:  “God I need you.”

A sense of peace came over me suddenly. I laid down and fell asleep almost at once. That night, my nightmares ended.  This was the beginning of my recovery and the first step in seeking not only divine, but also human professional help for my problem. I have not had another nightmare in the sixteen years since.  But, the most awesome thing is, since that night when I cried out to God, I have never been alone in my dreams. God is there with me.  I see Him and feel Him there.   His presence carries over into my life outside the dream world too.  God is with me all the time.  This is the first thing that changed how I pray.

Three years later, I attended a church retreat at Fort Caswell Beach where I met Laura Early.  She was a preacher the likes of which I had never met before.  She loved God out loud and spoke plainly exactly what was on her mind.  I don’t even remember specifically what she was teaching during that retreat, but I do remember needing to take a walk to think about it.  I realized I had let life get in between me and God, and longed for the closeness to God Laura seemed to experience in everything she did. I walked over a hill to the point where the inlet and ocean met, and as I crested the hill, the wind was so powerful it stole my breath and nearly knocked me down.

In that moment, I felt surrounded by God’s peaceful presence while the wind tore through the long grass around me.  I told God I missed Him.  I stood there looking out over the water and cried over the loss of intimacy I knew was my own fault.  After a while, I began walking back to the retreat.  I got near the building and saw a bench under a tree and sat down to rest for a minute before rejoining the group.  In that moment of rest, God’s voice spoke to me.  It was both audible and not. Breath and vibrations spoke into the depths of my soul:  “I miss you.”  Again, a very simple statement.  This is the second thing that changed how I pray.

God doesn’t care about fancy words or long prayers.  He just wants a relationship with us. The God relationship available to each of us is far more intimate than any human relationship could ever be.  The thing is, relationships can’t exist without interaction and conversation. God doesn’t need us to elaborate on our needs, because He is right there beside us experiencing everything with us.  He sees us at our best and our worst. Conversations we have with our best friends are casual most of the time.  We celebrate with our best friends and want to talk with them when we have a problem.  We talk all the time, so we often don’t require many words to get our point across, because we know each other so well.  In 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 17, we are told to “pray without ceasing.”  I used to wonder how that was possible, but that was before I learned how to pray.