PopClick, thanks I pray, but I feel like it's an onesided conversation. I'm talking and I get no answer back, you know what I mean?
Dan193 - In my experience, I would truly flip out if I heard a voice from saying this or that. This is what I'd be...
But instead, God speaks to me in action and in life. How do I explain that??.....you see, I sometimes think we Christians spend an enormous amount of time looking for that which we think is supernatural; something that we wouldn't see in a natural world. We wait for a cancer to be healed or a bill to be paid or a lover to return to us and while we wait, we expect answers feeling as though our faith is LARGER than the mustard seed that moved the mountain. So, what's the problem, we ask, when the cancer prevails and the bill goes unpaid and the lover is gone for good? Does that mean that God isn't working in our lives just then - that He doesn't hear our prayer?
This is when our faith is tested Dan193. This is when (and I'll get blasted here) - this is when charlatans get on TV and bang somebody on the forehead telling them they're healed or what I've come to know as "watchmen" convince me that by sending them my money it will come back to me tripled. Charlatans who preach politics from the pulpit or that all is centered around us and how good we feel and how much we can better ourselves and our finances. Well all I gotta say is RUN from these Dan. Run. Wipe your feet of it on the way out.
This is why PopClick advice was so timely and right for you. She offered you a prayer which was the prayer Jesus offered and while you look at it, uncover that every word of it has meaning. It can really be broken down into petitions - the first half to honor and glorify God and the last for our personal welfare both temporal and spiritual while on earth. Look at the word "bread" and how many meanings it has. We are petitioning God to give us our daily bread which teaches us sobriety and temperance and to not be idle. It doesn't say give us the bread of others but that which was honestly gotten. To lead us not into temptation - admitting before God and ourselves that we are weak and not be trusted but must run from sin and then to glorify God by having faith we are delivered from evil by His providence. We are taught to forgive so that by forgiving others of their trespasses, we are more apt to forgive ourselves of our own.
Lessons and actions of LIFE, Dan - these are God's thunderous earsplitting supernatural words I hear. And so we find deeper meaning in our life so that our self centered desires become less important - that we begin to understand higher callings, I think.