Only a small portion of believers pray. Most believers settled for saying grace, praying for good weather and asking for blessing in the tasks they set out to do. This kind of prayer can become a routine and does not bring us into closer relationship with our creator. I am saying this out of personal experience and observation. Prayers become dull and unattractive for us as time goes by. You can turn this around by changing the way you pray. Try these when you pray. 1) Before you pray, ask yourself do you need to in the first place. We can easily adopt an attitude to put God as our assistant or a "spare tire" just in case things don't turn out as expected. Change that by admitting to God we have been having these unworthy attitudes and admit that apart from Him we can do nothing. Acknowledging God as God is the key to prayer. Jesus said apart from himself we can do nothing. 2) Don't pray about the weather, a blessing for yourself, and your work. Those prayers have its place but we have had enough of those requests already don't we? Change that to ask God for a labourer in His field to do His work. Focus on His work, not ours. Jesus said to ask the Lord of the harvest to send workers to the field for the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Famous Matthew 6:33 told us if we seek His Kingdom our end will be taken care of. 3) Don't leave it to God. Pray persistently. Jesus spoke about a friend who woke up to lend bread to his persistent neighbor in the middle of the night. Don't be afraid to bother God with your request. He is not afraid of your persistence but the lack of it.

May we pray differently this year. The year had just started and it is not too late to change the way we pray.