I joined a prayer training online. Every day, I could reflect on “what is praying to me?” while listening to lecture of title “Restore your passion for prayer!” and reading some pray-encouraging articles uploaded on a social media of the prayer school. When the disciples had prayed for five times for a day according to rules and regulations, why would they had asked Jesus to teach them how to pray?

I could see that what was common in my prayer and the disciples’ prayer. It was an obsessive prayer habit. Praying became a habit and duty, and quickly praying became burden. On the first week of the training, I set a place and time to pray. I woke up at dawn and sit at the place for pray. I tried to pray all the time, while reading books and articles on the SNS. However, after a week, when I had a plan, my mind got busy. My heart was broken. I couldn’t figure out how to pray. ‘Lord, please teach me how to pray.’ I was a person who did not know how to pray.

I was trying to keep a busy schedule while carrying out assignments from the prayer school and praying for the next generation. I drank coffee in one afternoon but because of that, I had to spend all night with open eyes. When I tried to keep the time for prayer in the morning, I didn’t have energy to rise. While being powerless, some words came up in my mind, “be Passionate!” “Be Awaken!” “Be faithful!”

“Oh, Lord.” I called him helplessly, but he told me, “I gave you the prayers to open my mind to you.”

The prayers that I felt like burden were not for obtaining something. All the prayers were not burden but the means for the Father to bring me to his grace. God showed me the matters that need to be prayed for so that he could show me the Father’s mind, and thus, when I came to the seat for the prayers, he showed his wills and led me to pray.

‘Father, this is what it was to ask for your will to be done on earth as it is in heaven!’ Finally then, I could “יָדַע” (the word means “know by an experience” in Hebrew) or know that the Lord works through prayers.

‘Lord, thank you for teaching me about pray. Please help me not to be tempted and save me from evil.’ God is the only One who can save one from the sin of neglecting to pray, and God is the only One who can make one to pray by letting the one know his will.

Praying is the grace which makes one to know the Father’s will in the world where matters of unseen God’s world are revealed, and makes the matters to be accomplished with the Lord.

Passion is not my own, being awaken is not from me, nor is being faithful from me. He made me understand that everything comes from the Father.

So, now praying became gratitude to me. I am so excited about the Lord who will keep calling me, show me things and make me work. “Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him.”

Geun-Hui LEE

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