I was reading the research literature and came across something interesting about prayer.

Just last month five researchers published their findings on studies they had conducted on prayer. In a journal titled 'Mental Health, Religion & Culture', Amy Ai, Terrence Tice, Bu Huang, Willard Rodgers, and Steven Bolling found that of the four major types of prayer, only the use of "petitionary" prayer was related to better postoperative well-being in their subjects. That was mediated through optimism. "Conversational" prayer, by contrast, was associated with poor outcomes, mediated through acute stress.

They had followed a sample of middle-aged and older patients in connection with their experiences surrounding open-heart surgery. Pre-operative optimism and acute stress response functioned as mediators in this study.

For those who do not understand these types of prayer, let me explain. Conversational prayer can be thought of in two ways. It's dialogue, first and foremost. However, one way of understanding conversational prayer is that it is a group process; it usually takes place in groups, as one person brings something up, and another person picks it up from there and continues or springs off that thought into something else, and all of it, of course, is directed to God.

The second type of conversational prayer is when a person just "talks" with God in a kind of rambling monologue.

At least, that's what it would seem like to an outside observer, for the person praying is the only person one might hear talking. However, for the prayer to be truly conversational, the person praying must also be a person who is listening ¿ listening for God.

Can you hear from God? The question might be asked, "Can anyone actually hear from God?" How do you hear from a being who is spirit and has no physical vocal chords with which to speak? The answer is that you hear in your spirit. Spirit speaks to spirit.

I know. That just sounds weird. Think of it this way: have you ever had the sense of déjà vu, or have you ever had such a strong hunch that you could not ignore it, or have you ever felt the hair on your neck stand up? These are all strong and rather metaphysical experiences.

The presence of God's voice has been described as a "still small voice". He is not flashy and ostentatious. He does not shout to be heard. You can choose to run the iPod at full blast while trying to also hear from God, and God will not compete. His way requires that we come around to Him, that we learn to hear in our spirit, and you cannot do that while you are over stimulated by hearing with your anatomical ears.

So, conversational prayer is a give-and-take about this and that, sharing whatever is on one's mind, but petition is a knocking insistently on the door to get something needed. One type of petition familiar to most people is the one in which people ask God to save them from the consequences of what they've done. Another kind is in which people ask God for more ¿ more money, more food, more things.

Another kind of petition is to ask God to build capacity of one kind or another into one's growth. I have learned to be careful about what one asks of God, because His ways of granting it, while not diabolical, are often surprising and challenging.

Sometimes petition is about one's own need, but often it can also be about someone else's need. Then it is also called intercession. In one rural church other researchers collected prayer cards and analysed the content to find out what people in that church were actually praying about. They discovered that approximately 80 percent of the prayer requests were for other people.

So, what the study by Amy Ai and her colleagues indicated is that post-operative heart patients had better recovery when they prayed asking God for their needs rather than just chatting with Him about various things. Those petitions were more associated with pre-operative optimism while the conversational dialogues of others, who did not have comparatively as good a recovery, were associated with pre-operative anxiety.

I wonder if the effect comes from the process of asking with optimism or if it's just as simple as getting the answer from God for which one asks. Or is that the same thing?