Having faith is hard. Having faith in any one person is challenging in itself, but having faith in an omniscient and omnipotent power is infinitely more daunting. Even if you have a small percentage of that faith required to believe in God or whatever your higher power, you can’t stop there; you need to cultivate the relationship through prayer.

The other night, I was lying in bed, utterly exhausted, when suddenly, I had an epiphany. I finally thought of a good, rational way to explain prayer (disclaimer: I’m not trying to say I thought of this all by myself and that this is a totally original way to explain everything; just saying that I think I finally get it).

What gets most people about religion, apart from the belief in a higher power, is the practice of prayer. Those outside of religious spheres probably think that those of us that do pray are crazy. Especially in Catholicism, it seems contradictory. We believe that God has everything planned for us, but we still pray for things. Why would we pray for things if it’s all predetermined? If you stop there, it will never make sense.

My humble little epiphany involved this: prayer is about perspective. When you pray, you can’t expect God or whatever your higher power to just drop all your wishes on your doorstep like the UPS guy. Instead, you’re asking for a change in perspective when you pray. When you pray to do well on an exam, you’re not asking some holy force to possess you and fill in all the right answers. You’re asking to see all the ways and resources you have to help you succeed on that exam. Prayer works by opening your eyes to how you can get what you need. When you choose not to take advantage of those resources, that’s when it seems like things aren’t working. The thing to keep in mind is that prayer does not allow you to skip out on the work; rather, it helps you organize your mind and take advantage of the resources around you.

For all of the skeptics out there, there is one aspect of this explanation I want to highlight. I am not saying that praying will result in some powerful warrior riding in on a white horse to vanquish your problems. If you choose to do so, you could look at prayer more as a form of meditation. Meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, is a scientifically supported practice that has been proven to result in more bodily awareness and stress control. Similarly, prayer allows one to be more in tune to their surroundings rather than their body per se and then it facilitates the ability to draw from the environment what one needs to fulfill that certain prayer. The difference here between prayer and meditation is that in prayer, you are appealing to a higher power as opposed to the self, and you are crediting that higher power for creating a world where such resources are available to you.

For those who have a really hard time understanding the utility of religion, especially prayer, I hope that this clears things up just a tiny bit. My goal here isn’t to bring out your inner religious spirit, but instead to help you garner a more profound respect of those of us who do practice faith.