We know the four kinds of prayer: we can praise God, we can make petitions to ask God for what we feel we need, we can pray in thanksgiving to express our gratitude for what God has done in our lives, and we can pray in intercession to lift up others to God’s care.
But there’s a fifth kind of prayer that may be the most important of all: the prayer of “being with.”
This is a simple kind of prayer. It asks only that you be present and open to God. Matthew 6:8 tells us that God already knows what we need before we even ask. So, it’s not all that necessary to tell Him again. It’s really not as though He needs to be reminded.
What may be vastly more meaningful is to sit with God, with our hands empty and our hearts open, and say, “God, I’d just like to be with You for a little while. I have nothing to ask of You except that I hope I will feel Your presence. In any case, I am going to sit here with my heart open to You. If You have something to say to me, that’s all the better. But if not, maybe we could just be with each other for little while.”
Over time, you may find the “being with” prayer your most blessed kind of communing with God, and it may become your favorite time of each day.
I’ve been thinking about the connection between praising and giving. There must be a strong, direct connection because congregations all over the nation, if not the planet, routinely close the “giving” portion of the worship service with the Doxology: “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”