Why Prayer Is Important Now

Tina D. Erwin posted an article on the A.R.E. blog where she poses the question as to whether prayer for major world catastrophes helps much. She then gives an analogy of what happens during these events:

When a disaster of great magnitude occurs, there is a wave of grief, horror, fear, anger, bewilderment, and shaken faith that sweeps the whole planet. In the ether, this wave looks like black soot. It adds to the soot that is already there, but it is such a huge volume of new sooty blackness that we can feel the difference. We feel bad, achy, irritable, sad, and prone to tears and have queasy stomachs.

With this analogy to soot, I like the way she describes how prayer works to overcome it:

Prayer is the one spiritual tool that works in the ether. Prayer cleans up this sooty blackness, transmuting it into pure light. Prayer that comes from our hearts and is sent to all of those who are grieving, injured, afraid, confused and alone helps to clear them so that they can think more clearly. Prayer cleans the blackness of hurt and replaces it with seeds of hope and energy. Prayer is the energy that people need to get up another day and face a shattered life. That is what we can give to a person we don't know and to a place we haven't been. Prayer opens the way to cleaning up the physical mess the on-scene people feel and see.

According to Erwin, even when we are praying for others, we are also helping ourselves:

Prayer helps us to heal ourselves. As we grieve for others, we are often grieving for things that we have lost as well. When we pray, we open ourselves up to pure light and goodness. We may not realize it, but we fill ourselves up with this light so that we can send it to other people. This serves two purposes: we are healed and we are helping other people to heal.

And what kind of prayer should we use?

Christ was once asked about what was the best prayer and His answer was eloquent in its simplicity: the prayer that springs naturally from your heart, the one that you feel deep within you, the one that is the easiest for you to use to communicate with God.