“Prayer, whatever else it may be, is not calling God’s attention to things He’s not aware of, nor is it urging Him to do His duty. No, its rather a conversation in which we speak our minds and God speaks His. We talk and we listen until we get into His mind and He gets into ours. All of which means that when we get down to praying we don;t have to worry about what to say or how to say it. We can say whatever is in us. Though our prayers may spring from anxious fears or ungodly thoughts, God will take our prayers into his heart and turn them into something else and in so doing God’s tranquillity takes the place of our deep anxiety. His peace transcends our panic. Prayer thus wrung out of us by our deepest needs has been turned into something else. In our praying we have been transformed. This is God at work. This is the business of prayer – transformation.”

from Seeing God by David Roper