“I Kneeled Down Before My Maker”

“And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him; yea, and when the night came I did still raise my voice high that it reached the heavens.”

Enos 1:4

Kneel Down Before Your Maker

Enos prayed for what his soul hungered for all day and into the night. He "raised his voice high that it reached the heavens." When we need knowledge, comfort, or help, our first action should be to turn to the Lord. A few things stuck with me as I read about Enos and his pleading with the Lord.

• We have been given the gift to kneel down and speak to our Maker. Have you ever thought about that directly? The King of the Universe, the infinitely powerful and infinitely loving God, has given us the gift of prayer. Even more, He pleads with us to speak with him and share our thoughts and lives with Him. How often do we turn to Google or Reddit for answers and put God further down our priority list?

• Our prayers may take longer than we expect. We have been promised and can be assured that God hears and answers every prayer. The answer may not always be what we expect or want, but we can be sure it will come. It may not come quickly; getting answers to our prayers may take days, months, or years. Our conversation with the Lord is ongoing, and He has a work to do with us.

In April of 2024, Jeffrey R. Holland taught us this principle of prayer, "Brothers and sisters, I testify that God hears every prayer we offer and responds to each of them according to the path He has outlined for our perfection." He continued, "It is for reasons known only to God why prayers are answered differently than we hope—but I promise you they are heard and they are answered according to His unfailing love and cosmic timetable."

Prayer - A Life-Long Conversation With God

It is easy to think of our conversations with God as the time in between our "Dear Heavenly Father" (or Dear Lord, or Our Father, etc.) and when we say "Amen." We open, we converse, then we close. It might be better to think about our prayers in a much more expanded point of view.

If we thought of each individual prayer as one sentence in a longer conversations what would change? Would we be more open to listening to the Lord? Would we be more consistent in our repentance efforts if we were in an ongoing process or conversation? Would we be better able to ponder on our prayers or about our prayers if they did not happen quickly, one at a time, before we fall asleep at night? Thinking about our conversation over the span of a month, a year, or longer may help us learn "line upon line" as we discuss our lives with the Lord.

God Gave Us the Breath To Pray With

In the essay "The Wounded Word, the Phenomenology of Prayer", the French author Jean Louis-Chretien makes a beautiful point about prayer. For vocal prayers, the physical act of speaking recruits breath in a specific way. We must breathe and inhale to speak. Before we can address God we must take in breath. That breath is given to us by God. God put the breath into Adam, and gives us our breath each day, even when we never notice it and our body is working without our conscientious thought.

We are given prayer before we are given any of the items we ask or petition the Lord for in that prayer. Prayer is a physical as well as a spiritual gift.

And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul, the first flesh upon the earth, the first man also; nevertheless, all things were before created; but spiritually were they created and made according to my word.

And out of the ground I, the Lord God, formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and commanded that they should come unto Adam, to see what he would call them; and they were also living souls; for I, God, breathed into them the breath of life, and commanded that whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that should be the name thereof.

Moses 3:7, 19