Why do we pray?

Now is the time for mocking "thoughts and prayers," so it seems. "We need action, not prayers," they say, "Something has to change." They misunderstand why we pray. We do not pray to change God's mind, but we pray to change ourselves. There is a moral rot in our society and culture, and it begins with the moral rot inside each and every one of us. We do not pray to change God's mind, but we pray to change ourselves. That is where the evil resides. That is where the change is needed.

When we pray we confess that we are not God. That's a good beginning. If we are not God then we have no objective place to stand from which we can condemn others; we are all creatures of the same God and we all share the same moral rot. And we have not been destroyed. We are still here. God has shown us mercy, forgiveness, even love. Only God's mercy, forgiveness, and love can overcome the moral rot inside us. It's a beginning, and it won't be complete for some time, but what a gift a new beginning is.

Love does no harm. Murder is all harm and no love, the very opposite of love. If we do not love God we cannot love others. That is why we pray. We do not pray to change God's mind, but we pray to change ourselves. We need to stop blaming others. The blame lies within each of us. The action we need is actually the answer to our prayers: "I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." We pray to change ourselves. We pray that God will change us and remove the hatred and the murder from our hearts.

We pray to God that he would change us, that he would make us human once again. Why do we murder? Because we have become inhuman, and so we do not recognize others as human. We murder children in the womb because we do not recognize them as human. We murder people of other races because we do not recognize them as human. We murder the elderly, the sick, and the dying and feign to call it mercy because we deem their "quality of life" to be something less than human. We pray to God that he would change us, that he would make us human once again. Only then can we recognize, respect, and love the humanity in others.