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I call to you,\xa0Lord, come quickly\xa0to me; hear me\xa0when I call to you.\xa0 May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands\xa0be like the evening sacrifice. (Psalm 141:1-2)

God designed humanity with the capacity to think, feel and experience. The Psalms contain expressions of anger, relief, grief, praise, despair\u2026all reflecting the dynamic nature of how God made us in His image.\xa0 These capacities were given to us by our Creator God and so should be reflected back to him.\xa0 He knows us better than we know ourselves, so we should not be afraid or hesitant to let Him see what is truly inside of us.\xa0 The Psalms show us what it looks like to come to God in truth at all times.

The Psalms are designed by God for us to use in prayer and worship.\xa0 St. Athanasius said, \u201cthe rest of Scripture speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.\u201d\xa0 The Psalms give us language so that we can pray honestly and openly with the expectation that God will hear us and respond.\xa0 I\u2019m not going to go into why we don\u2019t always receive a response or the response that we want when we pray.\xa0 That is not the focus of today\u2019s devotional.\xa0 But just as David expected God to hear him when he prayed, as we see in the first verse of Psalm 141, God will also hear us when we pray to Him.\xa0 And He will respond in His own time and His own way.\xa0 We are simply called to be attentive because God\u2019s response often does not look like what we expect.\xa0 Even silence can be a response.\xa0 Through the silence of God I have personally been convicted, taught, and filled with the peace and love of God on numerous occasions.

A temptation in prayer is to reduce prayer to a monologue.\xa0 We pray to God but don\u2019t first listen to what He is saying to us. We want to hear the voice of God but with little intention of responding.\xa0 We even pray from our current emotional state, allowing our prayers to be driven solely by feelings instead of rooting our words to the Words of God found in the Bible.

We are also tempted to pray in familiar narrow patterns of relating to God that come most naturally to us whether it be thanksgiving, or protest or petition.\xa0 But God wants an intimate and abiding relationship with us.\xa0 He wants to be in conversation with us as we would talk to a trusted friend or spouse.\xa0 \u201cPrayer is the expression of a human heart in conversation with God. The more natural the prayer, the more real he becomes. It has all been simplified for me to this extent: Prayer is a dialogue between two persons who love each other.\u201d \u2013 Rosalind Rinker

And so, prayer is a dance of love.\xa0 We talk to God from the deep places of our heart and He responds from the depths of His own heart and His love for us.\xa0 He nudges and at times urges us to give Him more than the scraps from the tablet of our hearts.\xa0 He created us.\xa0 He knows us.\xa0 He loves us. \xa0We can give Him more than the familiar paths of prayer that we often pray.\xa0

Throughout the Psalms we see widely varied emotions and experiences which are at times intense, and from the depths of those places, from the depths of the Psalmists heart flows a deep trust and reliance on God.\xa0 That He is who the Bible says He is and that He will respond to prayer when it is offered up in honesty and truth.

So, feel free to even experiment in prayer.\xa0 No matter how large or small, silly or awful, He wants to hear it all. \xa0God can handle whatever we bring Him. He\u2019s God!\xa0 See what it feels like to give your anger to God, to praise God, to lament with him, to honour Him and tell Him how great He is, to simply sit with Him and wait on Him in silence.\xa0 Prayer is the door to a deeper relationship with God, to a deeper knowledge of our world and to what is truly inside of us.