A friend of mine emailed me this quote today: "Most people take their burdens to Him, but they bring them away with them again and are just as worried and unhappy as ever. But I take mine, and I leave them with Him and come away and forget them. If the worry comes back, I take it to Him again; and I do this over and over until at last I just forget I have any worries and am at perfect rest."
I found the thought intriguing. Why do we come before the Lord, if only to walk away unchanged? A common Christian phrase is, Prayer changes things. But what does it change? Prayer should change us. It should draw us closer to Christ. It should make our heart, mind, and will one with His and at peace. There are a few traps that we can fall into as Christians in regards to prayer.
The first trap is the "Laundry Load Trap". We come before the Lord with our heap of dirty laundry with the mentality of - fix this, this, and this, and help so and so, Amen. While God delights in us bringing our requests before Him, He isn't the magic fix Genie where we use Him to accomplish our priorities.
Another trap is the "Because I Should Trap". This is when we pray simply because we should. It's one of those rules that you just do it because you should. But what kind of relationship is that? Doing everything because you should? If I had a boyfriend I wouldn't want him emailing me, calling me, and all that stuff just because he should ~ I would want him to do it because he enjoyed me and wanted me. That is the way prayer should be. We should pray because we desire God, not because it's some sort of requirement that we need to fulfill in order to be a good Christian.
Falling into either of these traps will leave us unchanged. We will have missed the joy, the peace, and the satisfaction of intimacy with Christ. We will walk away with the pain, guilt, and worries that we came with. It will be empty and meaningless. Our communication with God needs to dig deeper than that.