Article November 28, 2011 Issue

How to pray + a lesson from Herb

By Debra Whitler

Have you ever wondered how people pray? Or have you even thought that you didn’t know how to pray? Jesus’ disciples may have felt this way. They asked Jesus to teach them how to do it. And that’s when he taught them (and us) the Lord’s Prayer which we can now find in the book of Matthew in the Bible (see Matt. 6:9–13).

Praying can be as natural to us as breathing. And there are many different ways to pray—as many different ways as there are people!

I suspect that you already pray quite a bit and don’t even realize it. For example, do you try to be good at least most of the time? Read what Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who started the Christian Science Church, wrote in the chapter “Prayer” of her book Science and Health. She said, “The habitual struggle to be always good is unceasing prayer” (p. 4). Habitual means doing something out of habit. Just think. You’re praying when you regularly try to be good.