So I recently read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret? by Judy Blume. I liked this book a lot. It was so cute! My favorite part, however, was the way Margaret talked with God. She was raised in a house where neither of her parents believed in one particular religion, and to her Sundays were for going on vacation or working on the house with her family. Margaret, however, believes that God is there and that he talks to her. She always just tells him what is in her heart. It reminds me of the scripture that talks about being childlike in our faith: "For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father" (Mosiah 3:19). Margaret talks to God about everything, from how grateful she is for her loving family to how much she wishes to grow up and hit puberty. I think it would be wonderful if everyone had such a personal and faithful belief in Heavenly Father. If we were all able to just sit down and say, "Hey Father, my day really sucked, let me tell you about it..." it wouldn't improve how much He knows us, but how much more would we know Him. Quite a bit, I'm willing to say. Maybe we should stop focusing on the things we need and start just having a conversation with our Father in Heaven. I'm not suggesting that we begin to be too familiar to the point of irreverence, but I think that making our prayers more like a conversation rather than a list of bullet points could boost not only our relationship with our Heavenly Father, but also our testimony of prayer and communication with the Eternal God of Heaven.
3 comments:
Great thoughts Sam. Reminds me of Elder Bednars talk on how to make prayers better.
very wise indeed, sam. i like that idea a lot. i think we're generally more caught up in using standard (and sometimes trite) expressions that we learned as children, which make prayers less personal than they could be. they become a series of cookie cutter phrases instead of conversations.
I haven't read this book, but I always heard it was just a sort of coming-of-age book for girls (like, about puberty and what have you...), but maybe one day I'll read it. It just always seemed like Judy Blume was a little beyond my particular demographic. Then again, I'm reading about high school vampires now, so...
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