Hi, I’m Nicole Symmonds, the Prayer Editor here at Beliefnet.com, who has chosen to go on this journey with Mark Herringshaw of making “Prayer Plain and Simple”. Now let it be known that I am not the most eloquent pray-er. I am not even the most consistent pray-er. But what I am is a person with a heart for God and in that heart is a desire to communicate with my creator in an authentic way.

I’ve been a Christian all of my life and prayer still confounds me. There are moments when I pray and I feel so victorious and strengthened and then there are moments when my prayers feel inadequate. There are moments when I am excited about prayer and my mouth is just ready to speak to God and moments when the prayers just seem to dry up on my tongue and I have no choice but to just get up off my knees and concede defeat. And then there are those moments when I just don’t want to pray at all, because, to be honest, prayer is hard. But in the midst of these dark nights of the soul in prayer, I still understand it’s an important part of my relationship with God and I want desperately to be a student, better yet, a disciple of prayer.

At the heart of all of this is to strengthen my prayer life through the one gift I am certain God has given me, writing. My posts on this blog will largely serve as my discovering my prayer personality and letting it unfold before my eyes and yours. I hope to learn from Mark, from you, and even from myself as this journey starts. And I consider this post, my first prayer, “That right before my eyes and yours, God would grow in me the desire to cultivate a real relationship with him through prayer and that the benefit would not be to me alone, but to all of those who are desiring to speak to God in an authentic, plain, and simple way.”