"...in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." Philippians 4.6.
In everything, that also means when you are feeling blocked from praying or so muddled with persecution that you may be intimidated not to pray or prayer is almost monotonously repetitive over days and weeks and even months.
The thing to do is to keep praying. Once you start praying, obstacles hindering prayer may disappear making prayer easier and more enjoyable.
Pray even if you feel that it's no use or if you are bogged down with doubt and unbelief. Better to venture a prayer than remain silent before God, in my view. Most of the time anyway. About being silent before God, I have been in a place where I have felt so silenced not to pray. I remember walking along a path thinking so what if I don't pray, maybe these stones under my feet will offer up prayers on my behalf to God. After all Jesus once said "if these were silent even the very stones would cry out."
Eventually God should bring a person out of a trial if that is what is hindering prayer or one of the prime factors. Even Jobs trials had a beginning and an end as well as a definite purpose.
Lately sometimes I've been feeling so blocked from prayer. Loaded down with burdens and being plagued by doubts and worries. Although deep down I believe God, it was still hard to bring my faith level up to the level I would have liked before launching into prayer.
But, I thought, why not throw caution to the wind, and fully trust God about who else apart from Him might be hearing my prayer. Just pray and leave all the mental, spiritual and psychological oppression to him. Simplify life because this is getting too complicated and tying me up in knots. So I made a decision just to keep prayer simple. Shut out all the fears, worries, pestering voices in my head and entrust them all to God. From now on let Him deal with them.
Since then, prayer has been more free and sweeter again. So maybe the lessons learned here are to pray in all things, even when things are not peaceful and entrust everything to God. Thanksgiving is always positive. When I hear a person saying a genuine thank you to someone else it sounds positive, so it must also make me positive when I say thanks to God for many things. Also God is owed thanks and I face Him and not negatives.
Anyway I hope this is helpful to you. God Bless.
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