Prayer as faith-food

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Afternoon Session of the April 1978 Conference.

Elder George P. Lee had some remarkable stories in his talk—like how his older brothers tied him up and tried to make him drink wine and beer. (They sounded like Laman and Lemuel!) But here's the section that stuck out to me the most:

Your faith needs nourishment through prayers. Exercise the muscle of the faith until it is one of such strength that it will sustain you. Beloved youth, get on your knees. The Lord has a testimony just for you—one that fits your size and needs—but you have to ask for it.

Your faith needs nourishment through prayers. I keep thinking about that statement and why it might be true. How does praying (a faithful act) nourish faith, other than just being a way to exercise that faith? You would think faith would be nourished by fulfillment—like, if you had faith the sun would come up and then it DID come up, your faith would be nourished.

And actually, I think this principle IS related to that. I was thinking awhile ago about how if you don't ask for something, you can't have it granted to you. So, for example, suppose I get an unexpected check—a tax refund I'd forgotten about, or something—in the mail. That would be great, but not really a miracle. But suppose I had been asking God for help in paying my rent, and THEN the check arrived. In this case, it would seem much more like a miracle! So even if God was responsible for the blessing in both cases, in the first case I wouldn't really even recognize it as a blessing.

It could be something a lot smaller, too. Something really mundane, like seeing a hummingbird. If I haven't been praying for anything, IF I even notice it at all, I see it and think, "Huh, that's pretty. Dad loved hummingbirds." And it's just a thing that…happened. But if I've been praying, "Please help me know that my dad is aware of me from the spirit world. I miss him, so please help me somehow feel his love"—and THEN I see a hummingbird, I can now interpret and accept that sign for what it really is: a blessing and an answer to prayer.

Furthermore, as someone commented in our Sunday School class the other day, "If I pray for something and it's granted, that's wonderful. I know God answered my prayer and I feel his love because of it. If I pray for something and don't get it, that is also wonderful. That gives me a chance to exercise even stronger faith because it's faith in the face of apparent silence. This is an opportunity for even more spiritual growth." But the key is that neither of those scenarios can transpire if we don't pray in the first place!

Prayer helps clear our vision to see the blessings God is already giving us. Prayer helps blessings seem like blessings.

"But," I can hear someone protesting, "if I pray for enough things to happen, then everything will start to seem like a miracle!"

Exactly.

Other posts in this series:

• Accumulated Testimonies by G
• Testimony: May We Never Ever Lose It! by Jan Tolman