Prayer works. Why? It gives God an opening.
God is always en route, but we maintain a consistent schedule of road closures. We’re building our lives, we say, so we shut down traffic that might make its home in us. Prayer, as a habit, keeps a spiritual ventilation in one’s soul. Driving an opening through the roadblocks.
What God gives us, He would also give without our asking. It’s just that our asking clears our sight, cleans out our ears, to receive what He speaks and shows. God would always deliver, always provide. We are the ones who set our opening hours, and too many of us remain closed storefronts, seemingly vacant from the sidewalk perspective, yet anxiously waiting behind boarded windows.
He can do everything for us. He could even let Himself in, but He has manners! Our body, leased as it may be, is ours, and He will not intrude on its tenant soul without request or advance notice.
The blockage is not our natural state, but it seems our natural state when too much in contact with the world for too long, without prayer, with just daily living, without questioning, with the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other dance of getting through. We are born with that valve, but everything less than perfectly spiritual works to clog it, even the tentative good, the day-to-day good, the life-necessary good, but that which is good without respect to eternal questions. Food for the hungry man is good. Food is good every day. But a diet of food alone will clog our access to God.
Which is to say, prayer opens us up to receive God’s blessings. When we receive something different than what we asked for, we often miss that the asking itself was still successful. We may have received nothing at all without it. Just as friendship takes effort, so too does a spiritual relationship. We can’t expect to receive blessings without giving, but lucky we are, sometimes all that’s asked of us to give is a question, a petition, a prayer. We give the Lord a prayer; He receives it as a gift and responds with a blessing in return.
Prayer is human initiative in the face of the eternal, the universal, making spiritual eyes so that the Lord knows He can approach us with His blessings. So, in a sense, prayer is how one makes the first move towards the unmoved mover.
The answers are always howling. Shutters rapping and knocking themselves against your house, a storm born out of eternal urgency. The inverse of a weary traveler come to your house for room and board. You are somehow under the roof and yet also the one in need of it in a greater sense. God comes to you out of the storm because you are too sheltered.
God, our words may say something else, but mostly we pray to let you in.