Those who really press and involve God with this petition in the expectation that he will answer it, as people who are seriously and fundamentally disquieted and startled, press and involve themselves too in their own plac and manner as people and within the limits of their own human capabilities and possibilities. They declare, and within their limits take on responsibility, that in the matter about which they pray to God something will be done correspondingly by them.
(Karl Barth, The Christian Life, p. 169; quoted in John Webster's Holiness, p. 76).
Perhaps that's why I'm sometimes reluctant to pray: I don't want to have to act on that prayer. I don't want to be that person who says a mindless prayer and forgets whatever-it-was. I want to care--but not too much.
