In Sunday school I used to teach, I always started with prayer requests. Some were big, some were small. And my seminary-trained brain often dismissed some as just silly ...

There’s no getting around it; prayer is risky, uncomfortable, scary. In prayer, we hope that we are reaching out in honesty and trust, hope that we are touching the infinite source of all that is good ...

To this day, simply hearing the word can evoke a wave of fear, guilt, and dread. Prayer hasn’t ever come easily to me, at least the definition of prayer I’m used to—prayer as our speech to God ...