“The best prayers I know are ‘Help me, Help me, Help me’ and ‘Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.’” (Anne Lamott) – from the Jack’s Wining Words blog.
Many times we may be saying “Thank You” for surviving things that we should have been praying “Help me” for in the first place. The free will that God gave mankind oft turns to a curse when it becomes an ego too big to ask for help. Sometimes it is our own insecurities
that hold us back or make us afraid to even try to solve our own problems.
There is an old saying in education that there are no dumb questions, just those that go unasked. The same is true of prayers. A prayer unspoken or thought cannot be answered. It’s OK to say “A little help here”. None of us is so strong, so smart, so brave, so accomplished or so confident that we don’t occasionally need a little help getting through a crisis or overcoming an obstacle or maybe just dealing with a personal problem.
Some people turn to friends or family for help and advice, but many just hold things inside. At the end of the day it can seem that we are all alone with our problems. People of 
faith know that they are never alone; that God is always there, willing to listen and to help, if only we ask. Most of the time the solution is already within us and what we should ask God for is help bringing it out – “Give me the strength to endure this, Give me the wisdom to make the right decision, or maybe give me the patience that I need to deal with this. Those things are all within us and God can bring them out. The thing holding them in is our own ego or insecurities and by way of prayer we lower those barriers and let God use what we have within us to resolve our problems.
One often hears, after the fact, people saying things like, “I didn’t know I had it in me to do that.” We all have “it” in us and faith and trust in God can bring those things out. Perhaps we should be praying; “Please God, let your power be shown through my actions.”
Try that prayer out this week and see what God can do through you. You may be needing the “Thank You, Thank You, Thank You prayer a little more often, too.
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