With summer in full swing, I’ve been thinking wistfully of many summers ago when I’d spend a good amount of my time swimming at a neighborhood pool or at a lake at summer camp. We’d have competitions with one another about how long you could hold your breath under water. Do you remember what that was like?

As you take a deep breath and hold it in, it starts out OK, but then you feel the pressure mounting, and that natural instinct to open up your mouth and take in a breath becomes more intense. Your eyes bug out, your face turns red, and you come up gasping for air. You find out that it’s a lot easier just to breathe than to try to hold it in.

I heard someone a while ago likening prayer to oxygen. They said that prayer is spiritual oxygen for the Christian and the Church. You won’t last long without oxygen as a human being, and in the same way you won’t last long as a Christian without prayer. Churches that don’t pray together are cutting themselves off from the oxygen of the Spirit, and those churches will die on the vine.

My experience with a lot of Christians is that they make prayer out to be much harder than it is. They overthink it. So, if you ask them to pray out loud for a group of people, they get embarrassed and shake their head with, “I wouldn’t know what to say.” There is a latent fear about prayer of not doing it right or saying the wrong thing. What if people think I am a big dummy? Even worse, what if I say the wrong thing and offend God?

These fears are certainly understandable. Something like prayer can reveal things that are held deep down, and we feel vulnerable or unmasked when we are put on the spot. But here is the thing about a Christian: God is your loving Father. If you think about him like that, it affects your view of prayer and it opens everything up. Prayer becomes a lot simpler. You don’t have to analyze or excruciate over what to say to your mom or dad, do you? What if prayer is just talking and listening to your Dad in heaven? What if instead of being weirded out over saying the wrong thing, we were able to approach God with the confidence of a small child who rushes into his arms? Prayer is getting alone with God on a daily basis and just talking with him. Prayer is also talking to God on behalf of a group when brothers and sisters are gathered together.

When I was growing up I had a lot of questions about prayer and how it worked. One issue I had was the thought that God probably didn’t need me telling him what to do. If God knew I needed something, or if there were something going on in the world seriously messed up, then what difference would it make whether I prayed about it or not? Another issue I had was I wasn’t fully sold on the idea that God interacted in the world at all. The problem of evil certainly made it seem like God was an absent landlord who originally set things up and then abandoned us to our own ends. (I later learned that this idea had a name: deism.) If God didn’t really protect people who were starving or in the midst of a war, or had serious issues besetting them all the time, then what did God care if I felt a little nervous about a geometry test?

Those kinds of thoughts got in the way of me praying in a way where I believed God was listening and responding to me. It was like I was holding my breath under water and I didn’t see the value in taking a big breath of prayer because it wouldn’t matter anyway. I came into a time in my life, though, with the upper years of high school, where I started taking the idea of God answering my prayers seriously. Sometimes, I’d launch a “God-if-you-are-up-there” kind of prayer. I’d ask God about something that was important to me, and before long the answer showed up. I’m ashamed to say initially I was thinking, “What a coincidence!” After many times of things working out according to what I was praying, I realized it took more faith to believe in all of the coincidences than it did to just admit that there was a being called God up there who was actually listening and responding to me. That’s when everything turned for me, when I stopped being a functional deist and started to pray as if God was listening and doing stuff in response.

That belief in prayer doesn’t mean I got everything I prayed for like waving a magic wand. If God is your loving Father, sometimes the answer to a request is “No.” I can see in hindsight that it wouldn’t have been a very good thing if I received everything I ever asked for in prayer. And besides that, prayer stopped being about getting things from God. Prayer started being about having an ongoing conversation with a person who loves me and wants what is best for me.

Let me ask you, when it comes to prayer are you breathing it in and out or are you holding your breath, teeth gritted, eyes popping? It’s easier just to breathe, and it is easier just to pray. Our Father loves it when we approach him, and he responds in just the right way. Try it and you’ll see.

Derek Russell is pastor of the Hillsboro Global Methodist Church. He loves Jesus, family, dogs and football.