Take the invitation

Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to His concern and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right. Our approach to the holy is not an intrusion but an answer. Between the dawn of childhood and the door of death, man encounters things and events out of which comes a whisper of truth, not much louder than stillness, but exhorting and persistent. Yet man listens to his fears and his whims, rather than to the soft petitions of God. The Lord of the universe is suing for the favor of man, but man fails to realize his own importance. It is the disentanglement of our heart from cant, bias, and ambition, the staying in of the bulk of stupid conceit, the cracking of hollow self-reliance, that enables us to respond to this request for our service.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 349