Prayer is much more than simply sending words up to our Heavenly Father, taught Cynthia Compton, Adjunct Associate Professor of History, during her BYU-Hawaii devotional November 18. It requires thoughtful, faithful actions and even the right words.
“Today, I would like to speak on prayer and the importance of carefully pondering what we should ask for,” Compton started. “This topic is relevant because praying in appropriate ways opens up the way for blessings to flow into our lives. And it may be that, at this time, you are in special need of blessings and guidance.”
Sister Compton used the story of Enos in the Book of Mormon to show what a strenuous, but growing, process prayer can be. “Prayer is a process of reconciliation with Heavenly Father. It is a process of finding out His will and aligning and reconciling our will to His. Make no mistake about it, this is no easy task. In fact, Enos refers to it as wrestling in prayer.”
Prayer is the way we receive blessings, taught Sister Compton, but it is also how we learn. “One of the many blessings of such a process of reconciliation is that, when we pray to the Father, He becomes our divine tutor, teaching us how and what to pray for. As He tutors and guides us, we will know more fully the character and attributes of God.”
With the needs of university students in mind, Sister Compton chose to focus on two aspects of prayer: “experimenting with the requests we make and using our prayers to consecrate,” she said.
Often, the problem with our prayers is that we do not have the faith to ask for things if we are unsure it is what God wants for us, Sister Compton explained. She used the story of Nephi, son of Helaman, to help find “a way through this conundrum.” It was at this time that Nephi asked the Lord to send a famine to humble his people, rather than the war that usually follows a period of wickedness.
Sister Compton said, “Obviously the Lord trusted Nephi not to ask inappropriately. But for me the story is further complicated by the fact that Nephi prays for a famine in order to bring the Nephites back to God. As someone who lived in an agricultural society, Nephi knew as well as anyone that famine brings hunger and death. What gave Nephi the knowledge and confidence to ask for such a thing?”
She then turned to the story of Alma the Younger and his many sermons on faith and prayer. When he came upon the Zoramites who “prayed in public, repetitious monologues rather than in engaging in sacred conversations with deity,” he taught them the great address on faith, found in Alma 32.
Alma compares faith unto a seed that will grow if it is a good and true seed. Sister Compton said, “While Alma used this metaphor to teach the process of gaining a testimony, the metaphor works equally as well in teaching us a process of learning what to ask in prayer.”
For many years Sister Compton had health issues that prevented her from receiving a full night’s sleep. To help her with this problem, she pled with the Lord that she would sleep through the night, put her name in the temple, researched her symptoms and went to different doctors. “I tried everything I could think of,” she said. “Still I was a walking zombie who barely got through the day.”
“Then, I thought about what Alma said. Maybe I needed to experiment with the prayer I took to the Lord. I altered my prayer. Instead of asking the Lord to bless me with sleep, I asked that I be led to information that would help me sleep.”
She explained that within a couple weeks she found information about her sleep deprivation and its causes, which allowed her to adjust her behavior and obtain the rest she needed. Of the experience, she said, “He gave me a prompt in my Patriarchal Blessing of what question, or seed, I should choose for my prayers. It took some experimenting to find exactly the right one.”
Sister Compton continued, “Experimenting with what we pray for is an important step to learning to communicate with God. Another important pattern of prayer is consecration. To consecrate is to dedicate something to a sacred purpose. When we choose to pray, we move to sacred ground; but that sacred ground does not automatically mean that our prayers consecrate our wrestlings to a sacred purpose.”
This is the very process Enos went through, explained Sister Compton. He pleaded with the Lord and was forgiven of his sins because of his faith in Christ. When his sins were forgiven, he wanted to help his brethren also obtain forgiveness, and he prayed for them as well. “And so, through the process of prayer, Enos began to consecrate his purpose to that of serving God and committing himself to the work of eternal life,” taught Sister Compton.
This process of consecration can be very challenging, shared Sister Compton. She used the example of Joseph Smith and his prayer as recorded in Section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants while he was in Liberty Jail. His prayer was full of pleading and emotion, searching for solace. “It is feelings such as these expressed by Joseph Smith that often leaves us hungering and thirsting for God… Such feelings, though, are difficult to transform. At those moments, our sincere prayers for help allow God to bless us without casting aside our free agency. Our petition gives Him the space to lift us from where we are to a new place, where we understand and desire His will.”
Sister Compton shared her own experience with consecration as a teacher at BYUH. After receiving her Ph.D, Sister Compton felt her teaching would improve, but it was not until after she changed her prayers to focus on the welfare of her students that she started to see changes. “I am still in the midst of this process of planting and tending to this seed, but I can report that as I have chosen to focus more on the work of the Father and more on the welfare of my students I have experienced an increase of inspiration in the classroom and feel, more often, the sweet quickening of the Spirit.”
To end her address, she cited a prayer given by Paul to the Ephesians. She said, “It is a prayer that suggests that Paul spent many years experimenting with what to ask God, it is a prayer of consecration, it is a prayer that testifies that when we pray, we can tap into the expansive power of God. Paul’s prayer is also the prayer of my heart for those of us gathered today.”
“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”
-Photo by Ian Nitta
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