“Success is not in what you have, but who you are.”
– BO BENNETT
Success is to be able to look back upon one’s life in satisfaction. Mediocrities will measure success only by money, power, and material things. A good life, complete happiness, joy, freedom from worries and anxiety, peace of mind, tranquility, and contentment are what truly defines success, and these are what everyone aspires or prays to have. Prayer is the act of seeking from God; a solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD also said “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
Prayer prepares and eases your path to true success. No man is greater than his prayer life. To achieve astounding success in life, healthy prayer is the key. How then will prayer help unlock your success?
Contentment
Healthy Prayer creates mental or emotional satisfactions which are the aftermath of being at ease with your condition or situation. Contentment is a state of accepting your situation, which is a form of happiness and tranquility. With contentment you have developed the science and art of enjoying what you are blessed with while keeping you from the good relentless and blind pursuit of what you do not have—which leads to misery, anxiety, and depression.
“There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for anyone’s greed,”
GANDHI.
Contentment is one of the keys to true success; acquire it through prayer.
Tranquility and freedom from worries and anxieties
Prayer enables you to make peace with yourself, your life, circumstances within your control, and those you have zero or little control over. Entrusting your affairs to God frees your mind of worries and anxieties. “If you are driven by fear, anger, or pride, nature will force you to compete. If you are guided by tranquility and peace, nature will serve you,” so they say. Prayer instills tranquility in you which enables you to conquer your challenges, worries, and anxieties.
SRI S. SATCHIDANANDA said, “We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing?”
Healthy prayer makes you calm and serene in the face of the most daunting obstacles or challenges.
Strength and motivation
Prayer fuels your strength and desire to do and accomplish goals that you find important or tantamount to being successful. With prayer, which puts God by your side, you are unstoppable. You will disrupt your worries, fears, and anxieties that impede progress and success, while being strengthened to wake up each morning with motivation and enthusiasm that will help you accomplish your goals and objectives. Believe in the power of prayer. Sometimes all you have to do to overcome depression, anxiety, worries, and pessimism is to prostrate before your God and ask His divine intervention. When all things seem to be falling apart, pray with faith and conviction. God will never forsake you; He will strengthen you with needed motivation to scale through your challenges. Pray!
Creates “Smart Work” effects
If hard work is putting a lot of effort in accomplishing a goal or objective, then what makes the art of achieving the same goal or objective smart? Smart work means investing less effort in attaining the same goal with better results.
“Don’t rush just because you have reasons! Reason with the reasons and take definite action in the right direction, in haste, where needed, or with patience, where it is essential to do so! Mind your thought and think about your action!”
–ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
To work smart, you have to act in the right direction at the right time, which can be achieved through prayer and patience.
Changes things
As Watchman Nee said, “Our prayers lay the track down which God’s power can come. Like a mighty locomotive, his power is irresistible, but it cannot reach us without rails.”
Problematic situations can be changed by laying the rails through prayer. Pray! Prayer changes things.
Good and joyful life
Problems seem to fall away with healthy prayer. Pray for change on how you view your problems and challenges positively, once you are in the presence of God.
“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim, and end of human existence,” said Aristotle.
David Hume also said, “The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness.”
Being happy with yourself and your conditions can be attained through prayer, faith, and patience.
How can you pray healthily?
Here follow the means of achieving a healthy prayer life. Those who achieve them will live a joyful and good life while those who fail to achieve them will live a life of misery and hardship; although they pray (but not healthily) while there are others which are in between, according to the means they can attain. These means include the following:
Faith and righteousness
Always keep your communication line open with God; if you only display traits of faith and righteousness when you’re in trouble, you’re in trouble. “I do not pray for success; I ask for faithfulness,” said Mother Teresa. If you work righteousness while you truly believe, you will have a good life concerning contentment and lawful provision. When a righteous man prays, it is effective and powerful. Those who have faith and perform righteous acts will have a profoundly healthy prayer life. It is very clear why this is so. Believing in God with sincere faith motivates them to do righteous deeds that change hearts and attitudes and guides them to the straight path in this world. They follow principles and guidelines, meaning they deal with all that occurs to them, be it the causes of happiness and excitement or the causes of anxiety, worry, and grief. They handle that which they like by accepting them and giving thanks for them, and using them in good ways. Dealing with them this way creates in them a sense of excitement and the hope that it will continue and that they will be rewarded for their gratitude by God, which is more important than the good things that happen to them. They handle negativity, worries, and distress by resisting those that they can resist, alleviating those that they can alleviate, and bearing with goodly patience those that they cannot avoid. Thus, as an outcome of the bad things, they gain a lot of benefits, experience, strength, patience, and hope of reward, which are more important and which diminish the hardships they have undergone and replace them with happiness and hope for the bounty and reward of God. How pleasing is the state of the believer, for all his affairs are good? If to some degree good happens to him, he gives thanks to God for it, and that is good for him; if something bad happens to him, he bears it with patience, and that is good for him. This only applies to the believer. Remember that patience is to faith what the head is to the body. Where patience goes, faith goes, and where the head goes, the body goes. Maintain a list of prayer points and ask God for His divine intervention with faith and righteousness.
Positivity mindset
Another means of praying healthily is striving to eliminate the things that cause worry and to achieve the things that bring happiness. This may be done by forgetting about bad things in the past which cannot be changed, and realizing that dwelling on them is a waste of time. So a person must struggle to stop himself from thinking of them and also strive to stop himself from feeling anxious about the future and the things that he may imagine of poverty, fear, and other bad things that he thinks may happen to him in the future. He should understand that the future is unknown; he cannot know what good or bad things are going to happen to him. Only the Almighty, the Wisest knows that. One should understand that if he diverts his thoughts from worrying about his future and puts his trust in his Lord to take care of his situation through prayer, and puts his mind at rest concerning this—if he does this—then his heart will be at peace, and his condition would get better, and he will be relieved of worry and anxiety.
Being kind to people in words and deeds
This is also one of the means of praying healthily. By this means God wards off worries and distress from the righteous and immoral alike, but the believer has the greater share of this, and is distinguished by the fact that his kindness to others stems from sincerity and the hope of reward, so God makes it easy for him to be nice to others because of the hope that this will bring good things and ward off bad things, by means of his sincerity and hope of reward.
