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Standing beside the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you see the young and the old. At the Wall they rejoice in the good times and grieve in the bad times. You can hear the cries of their prayers, your ears strain expecting to hear the voice of God. As you approach the Wall you can feel the holiness coming out of the wall. You know that you are on holy ground. Jews will tell you at the Wall, Heaven meets Earth. In between the cracks of the wall are prayers written on pieces of paper. Some of the prayers have been mailed to Israel.

The Israeli government takes these prayers seriously. If someone addresses a letter “To God” it is delivered to the Western Wall. The letters are sent to the post office’s Dead Letter Department. They are then collected and place in a velvet bag. They are posted to God and placed in the cracks of the wall.

Letters to God? I know some will laugh at the thought. They will put the idea right next to the letters to Santa Claus. However these are not just children writing these letters, adults send their letters too. You can shrug the letters off as some silly notion. You can say that now we are too advanced, after all it is some silly self-help exercise that the uneducated do. Now we meet our problems head on and deal with reality.

If you are smart, if you want to deal with reality you might want to get out your pen and paper and start writing. After all these letters are prayers written down on paper just like the book of Psalm. I think that somehow these letters are special to God. You have to make an effort to write a letter. These letters are more than just a frustrated “Oh God!” we so often utter. Real prayer is an important part of having a relationship with Christ.

The first step in learning to pray is getting started. If you want to pray you have to begin praying. You can have a detailed analysis of the Lord’s Prayer, do a study on the Book of Psalm, and memorize John 17 but if you never pray you haven’t really gained anything. As Paul warned us in Timothy, “ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of truth.” I’m not saying you have to write a letter, but you have to make an honest effort. You have to remember you’re dealing with God and he knows how sincere you are. He honors a simple heart felt prayer more than any long proper prayer recited without feeling.

One of the problems we have with prayer is that it takes time to pray. Stop and compare the amount of time you spend praying to other things you do during the week. Just like it takes time to write a letter, prayer takes time. We can look at the time spent as time we could put to better use. After all we live busy lives and God knows everything anyway. Work becomes more demanding, kids need to go here and there, there is shopping to do, and after all of this the time remaining we would like to just rest. If this is the way you look at prayer then you probably don’t have time to pray.

However if you look at prayer as time spent with God, the Creator of the universe, you begin to see things differently. See your prayers sail over the Pearly Gates. Just imagine your voice or your thoughts echoing in the halls of Heaven. Watch as they make their way to the Throne of God. Suddenly prayer means much more and time becomes available. It’s time to call home. You have an audience with the King of Kings.

Copyright 2004 by Danny Woodall