When you boil it down, life is really about one thing: love.

Stop and consider that statement as you look around for a moment. Television shows and movies, books and magazines—they all seem to agree that people today are looking for a lasting, fulfilling love. Yet beneath the surface of day-to-day living, folks everywhere are lonely and fear they always will be. They’re shopping for groceries, commuting to work, and even attending church, wondering when the emptiness they feel will go away.

There’s nothing wrong with desiring a spouse, wanting children, or hoping to make better friends. But none of these things will ever be enough to satisfy our deepest need, or to reach the place within our soul that only the Lord can fill. Life is all about love, because God is love (I John 4:8), and He made us to have a relationship with Himself. What you may not realize is that this means prayer is all about love, too.

We tend to think of communicating with God as a chore—something we

Re bad at, feel guilty about not doing, and aren’t sure why we should bother. Too many of us were taught from a young age that prayer is simply making one-way requests to God, and we’ve never grown in our understanding. But praying is so much more: it’s the grace-filled communion of life with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Prayer, together with the faithful reading of Scripture, is our most powerful means of experiencing God and growing in our relationship with Him. It’s in these times of fellowship and conversation that we most distinctly hear His voice—calling out sin, speaking forgiveness, and healing wounds. Prayer, as it turns out, is where the tide of our loneliness begins to recede.

Through this relationship with the Lord, we don’t just get our fill. His infinite love, more than we can contain, produces in us an overflow—an abundance of the heart that will go a long way toward quenching the thirst of the needy world around us.

Now, isn’t that something worth praying for?

By faith I keep pressing on!