“Well, I'm going to try that way in real earnest now,” said Marty; “but I wish it was as easy for me to be steady about things as it is for Edith. She never seems to get into trouble over her tenths.”
A few days after this, when she was spending the afternoon with Edith, Marty told Mrs. Howell what a time she had had, and added,
“Doesn't it seem strange that I can't give my money regularly?”
“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Howell, “you have not asked God to help you in your new enterprise.”
“Why, no, I haven't,” replied Marty. “I never thought of it.”
“My dear child, we are nothing in our own strength. We should always ask God to help us, in what we attempt, and ask for his blessing. Unless he blesses our work, it cannot prosper.”
“But I don't know how to ask him,” said Marty, speaking softly. “The prayers I say every night are 'Our Father,' and 'Now I lay me,' and there's nothing in them about mission work. I should have to say another prayer, shouldn't I?”
“If you more fully understood the Lord's Prayer, you would know that exactly what you want is included in it. But why cannot you ask for what you desire in your own words? Just go to God as trustingly as you would to your mother, when you want something you know she will let you have, if it is good for you to have it. And that would be really praying, for, Marty, don't you know there's a great difference between saying prayers and praying? You may say a dozen prayers and not pray at all.”
“Don't I pray when I kneel beside the bed and say those two prayers?”
“You do if you make the petitions your own, and really desire what you ask for, and if you ask in the right spirit. But if you just say the words over without thinking what you are saying, or whom you are speaking to, it is not praying at all. It is mocking God.”