Walk and talk and work and laugh with your friends. But behind the scenes keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship. Keep it up throughout the day. Let inward prayer be your last act before you fall asleep and the first act when you awake.
– Thomas R. Kelly,
A Testament of Devotion, 1941
Our prayer is communion with God. We may express it in expectant longing for wisdom and help, or in praise, confession, petition, intercession, thanks, relief, awe, or grief. We can set aside a daily period for prayer and cultivate with patient persistence the habit of inward prayer in the midst of outward activity. In meetings for worship, including those with a concern for business, humble prayer spoken with tenderness towards others can help make the group aware of the presence of God.
We lay before God not only our personal needs but the needs of others as well. Even as the Spirit finds expression through words of truth and acts of love, so it touches those in need of comfort through our prayers of tender concern.
In bringing our concerns before God we must be ready to accept God’s guidance. Accordingly, faith in prayer can be complete only if we leave to God the form of that guidance and ready ourselves to follow it. Through prayer, our wills may come to correspond more closely with the divine will.
After thou seest thy thoughts and the temptation, do not think but submit, and then power comes. Stand still in the Light and submit to it ... and when temptations and troubles appear, sink down in that which is pure, and all will be hushed and fly away. And earthly reason will tell you what ye shall lose. Hearken not to that, but stand still in the Light.
– George Fox, Epistle 10
We testify to the reality of a spiritual universe that we do not fully comprehend. We seek to live under its order and in its strength, each according to the measure of light given. Prayer made in faith can restore and heal the body, mind, and spirit, and we encourage Friends to undergird all medical and psychological treatment with this power of prayer.