Publisher's Synopsis
Dryness in Prayer Remember the first time you had to sit thru prayer without feeling God's presence. Maybe you, like myself, were expecting to go to prayer make a few acts of faith and know that God was going to show up and you'd sense his presence. When we were surprised that God didn't make, his presence felt, something changed. We realized that God cannot be always making us feel good about our prayer. We waited and waited, but still nothing happened. We kept looking at our watch and every minute seemed to get longer and longer, until finally we finished the time we had committed to staying. On leaving prayer, maybe we began to question ourselves if we had done something wrong or failed to do something we were supposed to. This is a common problem in prayer. God makes the rules of our interior life and we have to learn to follow as best as we can. God is Mysterious (but loving) and we have to roll with the punches. God knows that we must all grow up and become mature. After all when we were kids our parents weaned us from our play pen, our toys, our little candies and favorite foods we always wanted. God sees us in a much deeper way. He sees the road ahead and knows what we need to persevere thru the race of following him. These times only test our love for God and others. We learn to see ourselves as mature Christians and come to know that we can still follow the Gospel and carry out our duties because we didn't experience feelings in our prayer that morning. Maybe later that day God came to you in a different way. He chose to reveal himself in a beautiful sunset, the singing of a bird, a kind gesture of a stranger or the will to faithfully carry out your responsibilities that day at work. God wants us to worship him in "Spirit and in truth." The spirit blows where it will and always leads us to the Truth about ourselves and God. At one point in our spiritual lives, we will have to deal with dryness in our prayer life. Dryness can be defined as the lack of feelings in our prayer. For one reason or another, God allows us to experience the unemotional state of being with him, but not feeling being with him. Being with God is one thing, but feeling that you are with him is another. The first is absolutely necessary, while the second is not altogether necessary. An analogy of this state is like a parent who is up in the stands watching his son play a baseball game. Though the son doesn't see his Father, he knows he's there. Even when he hits a home run and the whole crowd is cheering him, he doesn't see his Father cheering him, but he believes that his father is proud of him. It is the same with dryness in prayer. we go to prayer because we love God and not because we love ourselves. When we feel God present we have a tendency to think of ourselves more than God, but God hasn't changed, nor will his love ever change for us: "I am the Lord and I change not." When we experience dryness in prayer, we need to get in touch with our motive for prayer. We may even questions our own motive of why we pray at all. It is neither good nor bad that we experience feelings, it is part of our experience of God. What is important is that we know our intention of why we pray and we make acts of prayer to God.
