Prayer is the only action you can take that truly makes things different—from the inside out.

A young man with a grave problem was asked by his minister, "Have you prayed about it?" He answered, "Prayed? This is no time to pray. It's time to do something!"
To pray is to do something—the most important "some-thing" you can first do about any problem.
Why?
Because prayer is where the true action is! Prayer is the only action you can take that truly makes things different—from the inside out.
This is true because physical action releases the weakest form of energy, whereas mental and spiritual action releases the highest form of energy.
Prayer deals primarily with the states of mind and laws of mental activity that rule your world. Prayer changes your mentality; prayer first changes your thinking as it calms, uplifts and renews you. This is one of the purposes of prayer—to change your thinking, which in turn changes your world.
But prayer goes further. There is another reason for all the shouting about the "power of prayer."
Prayer releases the highest form of energy in the universe, as it links you with a God energy, which is your source. When this happens, prayer "turns you on!"
How?
When you pray, you stir into action an atomic force. You release a potent spiritual vibration that can be released in no other way. Through prayer you unleash and loose a God energy within and around you that gets busy working for you and through you, producing right attitudes, reactions and results. It is your prayers that recognize and release that God power.
You may not feel the force of prayer because it operates at a higher vibration than that ordinarily felt by man. In fact, prayer releases an energy that is usually too fine to be recorded physically.
Nevertheless, as you pray you expand mentally and spiritually so as to become big enough in consciousness to receive a larger flow of the divine energy generated through prayer. Prayer is not only asking and communing. Prayer is also receiving.
A skeptic once insisted that he did not believe in the power of prayer. When asked if he had ever prayed, he replied that he had once. His explanation was that on that occasion he was lost in a deep forest and could not find his way out. He had been there several days and was beginning to feel the pangs of starvation. He said that in his "weakness" he prayed.
"Then God did answer your prayer, or you would not be here," exclaimed his acquaintance.
"No," replied the skeptic, "God did not answer my prayer. A couple of hunters came along soon afterward and showed me the way out."
This man did not understand that his prayer had been answered, and that the hunters were the human agency through which God's work had been done. Nevertheless, through the act of prayer, he had for a moment recognized the God power within and around him, and had thereby contacted and released it to produce results for him. He had not only asked; he had also received.