The Missing Half: Why Your Prayers Feel One-Sided and What to Do About ItНамуна

If you're just getting started with prayer or feel like you need more structure, I want to give you a trellis or two, so your prayers can enjoy the kind of support that sustains my wife's plants. A trellis is a supporting structure that helps a plant grow by providing external support. Eventually, the plant outgrows its need for the trellis, but initially, that structure is essential.

I have to confess something: I'm usually allergic to acronyms and clichés. They make me cringe. But a coach named Jason once challenged me: "Scott, truth comes wrapped in cliché. You can either care about saying something new, or you can care about saying something true."

Here's a simple yet powerful acronym that can help structure your prayers: P.R.A.Y.

P - Praise: We praise God not because He has an ego problem, but because He's worthy of praise. As Psalm 150:6 NIV says, "Let everything that breathes praise the Lord." Why? Because everything that breathes owes God its breath. You're breathing right now because God breathed life into you.

R - Repent: This is also evident in the Lord's Prayer, as Jesus taught us to pray, asking for forgiveness, even as we seek to forgive others. Part of dialogue with God involves owning the places where we've messed up, hurt people, and fallen short of His standard.

A - Ask: This is the part most of us are familiar with. Paul writes in Philippians 4:6 NIV, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." God wants us to share our needs and requests with Him.

Y - Yield: Every prayer ultimately ends here. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10 NIV) Even Jesus, in His most desperate moment in the garden, prayed, "yet not My will, but Yours be done.” (Luke 22:42 NASB)

Now here's a crucial warning: this acronym is a tool, not a formula. What's the difference? When you treat it as a formula, you think, "Okay, I praised God, I repented, I asked, I yielded—now God has to respond." That's not how relationship works.

God doesn't owe you anything because you prayed the "right" prayer. Even a simple seven-word prayer like the tax collector's—"Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner"—can be powerful when it comes from a yielded heart.

This acronym is meant to help you get started, not limit you. Think of it as training wheels on a bike. Eventually, you'll move beyond needing this structure into more conversational, spontaneous prayer.

And here's something that might blow your mind: your prayers don't have to be either structured OR spontaneous. They can be both!

Structure enables spontaneity. When you create regular rhythms of prayer, it opens the door for those spontaneous moments throughout your day. You know those times when someone asks, "Can you pray for me?" Instead of saying, "I'll pray for you later" (and then forgetting), you can say, "I'll do it later too, but can I pray for you right now?"

I've discovered that when I pray immediately in those moments, I'm much more likely to pray again later. That structure leads to more spontaneous prayer in the future.

Think about how relationships naturally grow. Relationships move from formality to informality as intimacy deepens. The conversations you have at a cocktail party are very different from the conversations you have around a campfire or on a road trip. As we grow closer to God, our prayers naturally become more conversational and informal.

Tomorrow, we'll explore the other half of dialogue: how to listen to God. This might challenge you if you're more comfortable talking than listening, but that's where real growth happens.