11 Whenever I teach a lesson about prayer to someone just starting out, I usually use this example. Let’s say you wake up one morning shocked to find yourself in a prison cell. You’re there locked behind bars, and there is no one and nothing in the cell with you except for a tin cup. What do you do? The way out of solitary confinement Most people say that they would pick up the tin cup and start banging on the prison bars. I ask them Why would you do that particular thing? And often they reply: So that someone will hear and come and let me out. In its way, that response is analogous to prayer. Even though we are not locked in a prison cell, we experience in life many constraints, many obstacles, burdens, and snares. They make us aware of just how powerless we are left to ourselves. But no matter how daunting the trial or problem we face, it makes us recognize that there is someone other than ourselves who is out there, who can hear our pleas for help, who will come to us where we are, and who wants to help us get out of our confinement. All we have to do is call upon that person. Prayer is that appealing. Living a memory Once that other arrives at our prison cell and intervenes to get the door unlocked and open, our release from that prison cell is not the end of our relationship with the
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