I’ve heard our Senior Pastor at Seacoast, Greg Surratt, talk before about the concept of “Praying Through.” The idea is to really engage with God and pray until you’ve gotten everything off your chest.

Why do you think God created you?

To glorify himself? To love others? To fulfill a call?

If you have kids, why did you have them? Certainly not to clean the kitchen! You had them to love them. In the same way, I believe that God created you to love you.

It’s not his goal to simply have prayer transactions with us. His hope is for us to have relationship with him. Perhaps one of the reasons that God allows us to be burdened from time to time is so that we will turn to him and engage him in relationship.

When was the last time that you had a good, hard prayer session? One where you asked the hard questions and prayed about the stuff that mattered most to you. This is the kind of prayer time that doesn’t happen in 5 minutes. You probably need to be alone for this and you need to be in an environment where you can be vulnerable.

God created you to love you and he wants to have an intimate relationship with you. C.S. Lewis said, “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Maybe God is allowing pain in your life right now to wake you up so that you will turn to him. How are you going to handle that pain? Are you just going to toss a few prayers at the ceiling ? Or are you going to pray through until you have connected with the Living God?