Prayer

This is my second post for today. If you are interested in my weeding adventures, see below. I have been praying for about 3 decades now and let me begin by saying - - I highly recommend it! Let me follow that by saying that I go through stages when I feel that my prayer life is wonderful and other times when I feel like it is lacking and it is usually because I feel confused and wonder if I am doing things correctly. I hope that is because I am growing and not because I am regressing. Either way, now is one of those times and I thought that it might be helpful to ramble on a little here in blogdom. Beware, when I ramble, I really ramble!!

Things that I Believe:
1. Prayer is communication between us and God.
2. God hears all of my prayers.
3. God answers all of my prayers in one form or another.
4. God knows everything and therefore can see what is best for me.
5. God can do anything including miraculous works. Why He performs miracles that we can see for some people and not for others, I don't know, but I don't need to know either.

How I Pray:
God and I have a 24/7 open communication policy. I love knowing that He hears all that I think and I am great at Breath or Sentence prayers all day long. "Thank you God for this beautiful day", "God, please help me to be helpful today", "God, corn on the cob is so tasty, thanks.", etc. etc. I have even been known occasionally to throw up a prayer for a fictious character on TV when I am obviously too invested in a plot (now that is sad :)).
My focused prayers where I stop what I am doing and try to spend a dedicated time praying aren't as easy. My mind wanders frequently (hence my blog title) and I can fall asleep without much encouragement. I am also a list-maker and that worries me. I don't want to run down a list with God, however I also don't want to be the kind of person that tells someone that they will pray for a situation and then doesn't. My memory is poor, so I make lists. Then, my lists get longer and longer and longer and it gets overwhelming. I don't want to be misleading, I have non-list prayers with God too, but I can't say that it is every single day and I often feel like I am being a bit aimless, which is probably because I work well with rules (pray 5 minutes 4 times a day, etc. etc. I would kick butt if things were set up that way!!!), but I know that is not the way that prayer works.

Other Confusions:
Bear with me on this thought: If I believe that God knows best, why don't you just pray "God do Your will in everything." Now that is obviously not very creative, but do we change God's mind or timing by praying about something? If I see a car accident and I pray "God please help everyone to be okay", is He going to change whatever He was going to allow because of that prayer? Is it possible that there are many means to the ends that He has planned and sometimes honors our prayers by changing a means to get to the same ends. If so, does it matter how fervent the prayer is or how many people are praying. Think of emergency situations where many people pray at one time...is that different than one person praying? Obviously there are many verses in the Bible that deal with this too, but my confusion still remains.

I hope no-one thinks that I am being flippant with any of this, I am just trying to sort out my thoughts and learn as I go. Thanks for reading.