Shadows

...Prayer is a man's impulse to open up his life at its deepest level. People pray because they cannot help it. In one way or another, I think, all people pray.

And God, of course, is the stranger. Does he listen? Does he answer? Does he exist at all? The light is so dim, and we are so caught up in ourselves, that sometimes it is hard to be sure whether the stranger is really there or just the shadow cast by our own starved longing for him...

[But as we pray] The shadows become a face, a presence. The stranger turns out to be no stranger. It is not that God has to be pestered into compassion by our persistence, but that it is only through persistence, through hoping against hope, believing despite doubt, that a man can open himself to receive the compassion that is there in abundance. It is only when you ask a question out of your very bowels that the answer is really an answer. It is only when you stretch out your hand for it until your arms ache that a gift is really a gift.

--Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat