Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that prayer was formal. That it required the right words, the right posture, the right amount of worthiness. That it was a petition sent upward to a distant God who would evaluate the request and respond — or not — according to criteria we could never quite understand.
I have developed a different relationship with God.
Prayer, as I have come to know it — through almost eighteen years of walking the grief journey and through every dark night of my own soul — is not a petition. It is a conversation. It is the most intimate, most honest, most direct relationship available to us as human beings. And it requires nothing more than your willingness to speak.
After Bryan died, I screamed at God. I pounded the floor. I bargained, begged, and demanded answers to my endless questions. I almost made a deal with the Devil himself if he would only bring Bryan back to me. And somewhere in the middle of all of that raw and unfiltered desperation, something shifted. I started talking to God the way I talked to my closest friend — with everything, holding nothing back.
And God, as I experience the divine — not as a distant judge but as an unconditionally loving presence that has never once left my side — met me there. Every single time.
This is what I want you to know: you do not need to clean yourself up before you pray. You do not need to have the right words or the right beliefs or the right level of faith. You can come exactly as you are — broken, doubting, exhausted, furious — and the conversation will be received.
Talk to God the way you talk to someone who loves you completely and is not going anywhere. Because that is exactly what prayer is