Simple Prayer

So I was reading this book that a very dear friend of mine (thank you Hayley Ettelson) gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago.  I have tried and tried to get into reading it, but I guess the Lord has his timing.  Let me just convey a passage -

"[There] is a notion - almost universal among us modern high achievers - that we have to have everything 'just right' in order to pray...Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics.  That puts us on the 'on-top' position, where we are competent and in control.

But when praying, we come 'underneath,' where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent. 'To pray,' writes Emilie Griffin, 'means to be willing to be naive.'

I used to think that I needed to get all my motives straightened out before I could pray, really pray...never pray again until my motives were pure...I did not want to be a hypocrite...I knew that I must not use God for my own ends.

The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives - altruistic AND selfish, merciful AND hateful, loving AND bitter.  Frankly, this side of eternity we will NEVER unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure.  But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.  We do not have to be bright, or pure or filled with faith, or anything.  That is what grace, means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well.  And we pray by it."

For those who believe in divine providence, there were snippets of this that were literally highlighted on the pages for me (even though there is no highlighter on the page), and I felt lead to share the passage.