It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily lives. If we find we cannot help others, the least we can do is to desist from harming them.
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.
We learn to pray by praying. One can devote countless hours to examining the experiences of others, but nothing penetrates the human heart as does a personal fervent prayer and its heaven sent response.
Meditation is not a technique to master;
it is the highest form of prayer,
a naked act of love and effortless surrender
into the silent abyss beyond all knowing
No president ever puts American lives at risk without a terrible sense of responsibility. And no American ever hears or reads of a soldier’s death without saying a silent prayer for the dead hero or thinking of the grief of the family and friends. Every young man or woman who dies represents a life with its own dreams and plans, extinguished so suddenly. But all said and done, it is our responsibility to see that (1) we never put our troops in situations where they are subject to unnecessary risk, and (2) we give them all our support at all times.
I have had prayers answered - most strangely so sometimes - but I think our Heavenly Father's loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.
This doctrine of prenatal influence is now slowly being recognized, and science as well as religion calls out: 'Keep yourself holy, and pure.' So deeply has this been recognized in India, that there we even speak of adultery in marriage, except when marriage is consummated in prayer.