The Moving Power of Prayer

The feeling of loneliness is one of the problems of many people—especially the loneliness of the person who cannot find comfort and assurance and help outside himself—especially the loneliness of the person who has never found the great and moving power of prayer.

Prayer is a source of strength, of peace, of courage and comfort—the comfort that comes with knowing that there is a Source of help—a source of wisdom and guidance outside ourselves, outside of human sources.

Some of the most sublime moments of life are the moments when prayers are remembered: the prayer of a child at a mother’s knee, the prayer of loved ones waiting; prayer in time of illness, sorrow, and in the problems and decisions of each day—the prayer of gratitude to God. We are moved by the thought of patriots in prayer, and by the prayerful approach to public problems. Men rise to greatness when they are most sincerely humble, and they never seem more sincerely humble than when prayerfully acknowledging the debts, the favors, the blessings of past, and seeking prayerful guidance for present problems.

It would be presumptuous to say that we understand the process of prayer, the means by which a person, in his need, can send his spoken or unspoken thoughts or his most sincere desires to a Divine Source. But the unseen facts and forces that we are already aware of should give us faith in other unseen facts and forces. When we have lived to see and hear men walk and talk on the moon; when we have seen computers keep the records of hundreds of millions of men, it shouldn’t be difficult to believe that there can be communication with unseen sources.

“We don’t know the millionth part of 1 per cent about anything,” said Thomas A. Edison. “We don’t know what water is. We don’t know what electricity is. We don’t know what heat is… but we do not let our ignorance about these things deprive us of their use.”¹ Nor should we let our lack of knowledge concerning the process of prayer deprive us of its use. There is an infinite wisdom that can and does know the needs of all of us our pleas and our petitions, the crying of the human heart, and does not leave those pleas unheard, unheeded.