"The question of Prayer is not separate from that of Providence, in so far as prayer is connected with natural or temporal benefits. The principle of prayer is rooted in the fact of need, want, poverty. Our Lord makes poverty the first condition of spiritual blessedness, because in it begins all that dependence upon God the end of which is oneness with Him. Out of that poverty come all godly sorrow, all noble meekness and humility, all hunger and thirst for Tightness and fulness of life, all faith in God, all hope in self, all true self-realization and soul satisfaction. Nature is meant to be deficient and self to be insufficient: the natural is complete only in the spiritual, and every self only in God. Therefore prayer is the breath and life of the soul: we want God as we want the air we breathe and the food we eat. Prayer is properly for all we want, from the daily bread of the body to that which nourisheth to life eternal. We pray for natural and temporal things as well as spiritual and eternal. But there ought to be a difference: when we pray for natural goods, we ought to pray for them "as God wills"--that is to say, as they are given, naturally; and when we pray for spiritual things, we ought to pray for them spiritually."
--- William Porcher Du Bose; Turning Points in My Life.
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