We come before God, both in our longing and our brokenness, our hope and our failure. We approach, not presenting an improved version of ourselves, but standing honestly before the One whose love for us never wavers. We trust that God already knows us, receives us, and desires our presence more than our performance. Communion, therefore, begins when we stop trying to control our relationship with God and entrust ourselves to the God who shapes the encounter. True communion is not something we manufacture; it is something we open ourselves to. As we entrust ourselves to the God who loves us beyond what we can measure or imagine, we are drawn into a depth of fellowship that surpasses anything we could create on our own. In the Spirit, we are drawn toward the Father through Jesus.  We get to share in Jesus’ communion with the Father.

Our anxious efforts to perfect our prayers often hinder the very communion we seek. Even with the best of intentions, we can become preoccupied with evaluating our prayers — wondering whether they are good enough, deep enough, or effective enough. In doing so, our focus turns inward, and we risk distracting ourselves from what God is already doing within us.

The heart of prayer is not self-evaluation but God-attention. When we fixate on what we are doing or what we are gaining out of it, we shift our gaze away from God and back onto ourselves. We must see that the form and fruit of communion belong to God, not to us.

Our task is both simple and demanding: to turn toward God in trustful openness and remain there. Even our prayers come from God’s Spirit praying within us through Jesus to the Father.