Prayer...another dimention to it

There is an interesting post on prayer written by Scot McKnight. I have to say that this may not be so familiar to the denomination that I come from which ravels in personal composed prayers. Not that this is wrong or anything. Personal composed prayers or prayers we simply 'come up with' at a given time are good and we also should have these types of prayer, because it is justifiable that if one has a relationship with God, then there are bound to be times where we just speak words that just come out of our mouths. We read a lot of examples of this in the bible.

But then again I think the christian circles in my part of the sphere have emphasized this to a scale that it implies that it is only praying in this manner is what real prayer is. Well this is the implication that I always get, and I just recently (a few weeks ago) heard a certain pastor (not one in Miri for that matter, and totally not all pastors but a certain pastor) simply state that we are not to recite the Lord's Prayer because it is not real prayer but something that was created. He said (in my own words) that real prayers are supposed to be said out from the heart of the person rather then reading out prayers. Well lets just say that I don't really agree with him on this.

Ever since my walk with Jesus, prayer has been a struggle for me. Not that prayer is something that I don't believe in, but I guess it takes time to adjust to it. I guess there are too many access baggage in our understanding of prayer that its meaning has been muffled and it's beauty disfigured.

Reading Scot's post on prayer give me hope in prayer because we can use prayers in the bible as aids for us to pray. There is also a dimension of prayer that follows a rhythm, things like ancient prayer hours. To me these are new concepts but only because we have been ignorant about them. I think our church would benefit much if we would venture in this direction. This could be an answer to the constant question asked by new believers, "How do i pray?". I am totally supportive of this direction an am interested in finding out about it to 'salvage' my prayer life.

Do you agree? Do you struggle with prayer? What are some methods or patterns that have helped your prayer life? Do you know of any other ways to help people the how's of prayer?