Ever feel like nothing is going right, nothing goes your way? Every day seems to be a struggle, a fight just to get through everything? You can have that feeling if you don’t have all of your instructions; you can’t do your job if you have not been told how to do it. Or maybe you’ve been told how to do it, but you didn’t listen very closely or you just plain forgot.

You’ve got pressure on all sides – your boss is wanting more work out of you, and your customers are wanting answers to their questions. Here you are in the middle, trying desparately to please both sides, and quite sure that you are failing both miserably.

Getting yourself centered can help. And I don’t mean “sit on a mat on the floor with your legs in the lotus position and find the center of your being”. The center of your being might very well be rather empty, and what you are looking for is not more emptiness. The “center” you need is to connect with the One who made you.

Connecting with God – there seem to be a million ideas on how to do that, from the very traditional to the very weird. The only God and the only connection that is satisfying and fulfilling is that connection with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. Your connection with him is through prayer. And prayer doesn’t have to be a flowery, well designed, grammatically correct statement that your English teacher would be proud of. It simply has to be a statement from your heart.

Your prayer might just be one word: “Help!” Or possibly two words: “I’m lonely” or “I’m scared”. Or it could be tears that don’t stop.

The prayer you need starts with this: “Jesus, I know I’ve screwed it up again. I need your help desparately. I admit my mistakes – my sins – to you. I’m sorry for those sins. Please come into my heart, and make it your own home. Clean out the garbage there, put yourself in control of my life, and I will follow what you want me to do.”

And whether this is a prayer you’ve never prayed before, or whether this is a re-aquaintance with the savior that you have been ignoring, God will gladly welcome you back. And if you’ve offered that prayer in sincerity, with a determination to make that connection with God on a daily basis, through prayer and through reading his Word, the Bible, you are on the road to getting those struggles and pressures in life to start being easier to handle.

Terry Clark released his first solo album in 1978 called Welcome. On that album is a song with a visually strange title: Ugadano Thawanu Maija. Read it (or listen to the song below) and you’ll know what he means. And carefully read the words: It tells in brief what I’ve labored to say here with many more words.