Prayer is a cultivated state of life. It takes time. It takes attention. Most of all it takes consistency.

Consistency is what raises simple regularity to the level of relationship. It is the awareness of God that draws me, whether or not I feel any immediate personal satisfaction in doing so or not. I reach out to God whether I can sense God reaching back or not.

All relationships take nourishing—the one with God more than most. So many things draw us away from it. We live on the plane of the tangible and feed it with things and events and people. Those are the things that occupy our minds. The spiritual plane we take for granted though nothing affects us more than the loss of it.

When we’re lonely or depressed or agitated or frightened, the material is of little or no help at all. Then, the things we own or collect may actually be part of our problem. What we really need then is the anchoring that only the spiritual can bring. We need the awareness that though life is not in our hands right now, it is surely in the hands of a God who loves us.

It is this anchoring in the spiritual that lifts us above the pressures of the present to the renewed consciousness of the eternal stability of the God who “wishes our well and not our woe.”

It is the effort to put ourselves in the presence of God over and over again in the course of the day that prepares us for the abiding Presence that is the home of the soul.

“Only in God,” the poet says, “is my heart at rest.”

In the long run, then, it is consistency, the everlasting turning toward God, that prepares the way for the eternal presence of God in the here and now.