“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.”

-C.S. Lewis

It’s fools game to pray expecting a particular outcome. Whether G!D hears prayer or not, exists or not, Divine Will or the quantum foam may shape a different outcome. But I find prayer essential.

First, as C.S. Lewis famously writes, prayer changes the one praying. Charity starts at home and so does change. To clear the mind, the heart, the soul; to cry out from an empty place, or an angry place, or a joyful place changes the one crying out. I always have a different quality of day when I take the time to pray early and often. It resets my hard drive and refocuses my whole being, it seems.

We are all enmeshed in a global system of biological and psychological and likely spiritual connection. As Dr. Martin Luther King wrote from his Birmingham jail cell: “What affects one directly, affect all indirectly.” No one is an island, so if I improve my physical, or mental, or emotional, or spiritual state, it send out ripples and dances with connections seen and unseen. Who know where it goes and who it impacts?

So if prayer changes me, it almost certainly changes the world. I don’t get to control the exact direction of the change, any more than I do when I let a trickle of water flow down a hill. But I can exert influence on the world by changing myself. Pray locally, change globally!

What change in yourself, in the world, do you want to pray for today?

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Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist. He held academic positions at both Oxford University, 1925–54, and Cambridge University  1954–63. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Joe Laur is a father, husband, naturalist, executive, consultant, and a lowly rabbinic student. Send him your favorite teaching quote for commentary. He can be reached at joe.laur@godsdog.net.