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Monday, August 12, 2019

Prayer - Review and Fine Points

By Anna Von Reitz

Jesus already taught everyone how to pray, but it seems that the message isn't getting through, so I am doing a little follow-up and drawing your attention(s) to some fine points.

First, our Creator is constantly creating us. Your present physical incarnation in living flesh began with an Act of God at a specific moment, but it didn't end there, did it?

There was the zygote and the amnion and the fetus and the baby and the toddler and the grade school kid and..... on an on. Every one of your trillions of cells and over 200 different kinds of tissues in your body get replaced on a regular cyclic schedule. You are being constantly created and in the verbiage of the modern era, "manifested".

Now, we just take all that for granted because from our perspective, it happens automatically--- but if you stop a moment and think, you will realize that all this is being ordered and orchestrated, along with a great many other things. He numbers the hairs on your head, because He is the One putting them there.

Just from that one example, you can see that you are not a static creation and your relationship with your Creator is not static, either. It's a vast, constant, intimate, ever-changing, dynamic interaction and the connection to your Creator is a built-in part of you.

Your Source is part of your Being and is literally "within you" in much the same way that an electric current is within a sewing machine, except of course, that this "electric current" is sentient. Your Father knows everything about you, and I do mean, everything.

You don't know how much keratin is in your toenail, but He does.

So there is no need to belabor your needs or drone on about the car payment. These things are already known.

There's also no way to hide anything. As the Irish say, "the all of it" is fully and completely known.

As I have told you many times, there's no way to lie about anything, so you might as well give up that bad habit, because all it does is cause dissonance and friction.

Lying actually makes you feel bad and "out of sorts" for a reason. Lying runs counter to the truth within you, grating along your nerves like a rasp on a piece of wood.

Stop thinking of your Source as something or someone distant from you or external to you or unfamiliar with you and your circumstance. Also stop thinking of your Father as a Deadbeat Dad; He has in fact given you life and everything else besides.

As He said to Moses as Moses stood on the edge of the Red Sea with Pharaoh's chariots closing in ---- why are you calling me? I already taught you everything you need to know....

So, because God is literally within you and knows the whole skinny, you don't even need to pray in words. You can pray with mental images. You can pray with feelings. You can pray using any form of communication at all and if you use words, the only important thing is that they are true and friendly and humble.

That's why Jesus gave you the example of The Lord's Prayer --- not that you should endlessly repeat exactly what He said, but so that you get the gist of how to pray --simply, truthfully, humbly.

Now, most men and women are prideful, and humbling themselves is not an experience they cherish, but it is necessary when you approach your Father and appropriate, too. He is far greater than you, as a man is greater than a child. You don't have to be afraid of Him, because He loves you --- but at the same time, show and give back the respect that He also shows you.

He is wonderful. He is present. He is all-knowing. He is, well, the True God. So if He humbles Himself to care for you and to give you life and He expends the energy to manifest your body and your consciousness and provides you with an environment that supports your physical life --- how much more grateful and humble should we be, when we turn our attention away from our small selves and address the Living God?

When we search for God within ourselves, we find Him. When we look around the Earth, we see His works and they reflect his glory and testify to His mind and heart, but He is not "out there" far away from us. He is literally within us. So look for Him within yourself, and you will find the glorious truth that you are part of the Living God and He is part of you.

You are part of All That Is.

He is not distant. Not foreign. Not vengeful. Not immune. Know this -- when we suffer, He suffers with us. When we rejoice, He feels that, too. So any idea that He is the cause of your sufferings needs to be released as the gigantic lie that it is. He may allow us to suffer for our own sakes, but that is a different thing from causing our problems or desiring them.

Prayer should be a gentle conversation with a Loved One, a Loved One who is trusted and respected, and whose generosity and kindness is beyond question or reproach. He does not withhold anything good from us, and all we have to do, is ask....and receive.

It's the receiving part, our end of it, that gets garbled.

Once we learn to pray to Our Father who is within us, and learn how to ask for what we need in a simple and honest way, we also need to learn how to receive and recognize His gifts which are returned to us as a result of our prayers.

Imagine the situation. We ask for the perfect husband, but we turn away because he doesn't look like we expect him to look. We ask for delicious, nourishing food, and then trample on it, because we think of it as weeds. We need a car to get to work, and sure enough, one just happens to be sitting in the parking lot at Walmart with a "Sale by Owner" sign in the window, but we don't call the number.

And then we complain and we blame and we stomp around like two year-old children and think we didn't get what we asked for. We did, yes, we got exactly what we asked for, we just didn't recognize our blessing when it came.

It gets worse, because we don't recognize our own blessings, we are constantly impeding the flow of gifts and blessings intended for others. Imagine being at the baggage carousel at the airport and everyone is grabbing someone else's bag off the rack? Imagine the confusion and consternation?

What's a Father to do with us?

Perhaps we need another version of the Serenity Prayer: Father help us to recognize the blessings you give to us, help us to see your miracles and to accept the hand-tailored gifts you send to us in answer to our prayers. Open our eyes to see these gifts that are meant for us and open our hearts so that we don't envy or seize upon the gifts that you have sent to others....

If we learn to recognize the gifts and blessings that are ours, hand-tailored, made especially for us, if we simply accept them, our contentment and joy would flow like the sea, and there would be no want or misery anywhere.

So while we are paying attention and learning how to pray and where to address our prayers, let's also learn how to recognize and receive the gifts and blessings that are so reliably returned in answer to our asking.

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See this article and over 1900 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com

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