Babies hold the universal secret to an awesome prayer life

Prayer can be so frustrating. Not only is it hard to find time to pray, but when you finally sit down to dig in it can feel almost impossible to focus.

At least, that was always my problem. In the past, I've often left prayer times feeling more anxious than when I sat down. I felt like I just couldn't get it. Then not too long ago, I felt God calling me to pray more. I told Him I wasn't any good at it, and He revealed the secret to me - through my two year old son. 

Babies don't even know anything

Silas is two, and he knows nothing about talking. He only knows a handful of words and phrases. And most of the time, when he opens his mouth, pure gibberish comes out. He also has no idea what I'm saying to him most of the time. There are a few things I can say that he understands - like the word cookie, he knows that one really well. But for the most part, when I talk to him, he just looks at me with a blank stare. But that didn't stop him from crawling into my lap yesterday and having a full conversation with me. 

I was laying on the floor playing cars with him. We like to crash our cars into each other. It's cathartic for both of us. And right in the middle of our crashing session, he stopped, picked up his car and began jabbering a bunch of words and sounds. The only discernible word was "car car" which was woven into his otherwise incoherent blabbering. 

The fact that Silas has no idea how to talk has never stopped him. And it has been his persistence that's helped him learn the words he knows. As he mumbles and speaks nonsense, he is slowly learning more and more words.

Growing out of spiritual infancy.

Our prayer lives are exactly the same. We're God's children, and when we're young, we have no idea how to talk to him. It can even feel like we're doing it wrong. The truth is, we simply have no practice. And in the end, the only difference between us and a baby is that we have the presence of mind to be frustrated when we feel like we're doing something in vain.

Ultimately, praying is just like learning to talk. You're not doing it in vain. And the more you do it, the better you get at both speaking and listening. And as we spiritually babble, we shouldn't expect that God isn't listening. Silas' lack of conversational skills has never stopped me from listening to him. It's the same way with God and us, even when we're praying for things that He knows are never going to be in his plan for us, He is always listening intently to what we have to say. 

In the end, the secret to prayer is to pray the way a baby talks. It'll take humility on our part to do something we know we're not good at, but the benefit is that as time goes on we'll learn how to connect with God on deeper levels, and that will lead to a greater spiritual vocabulary. Eventually what begins as rudimentary prayer will become deep fulfilling conversations with God. 

As you grow your spiritual vocabulary through prayer, what's the number one thing you pray for? Please leave your answer in the comment section below.