The following comes from The Magic of Effective Prayer. The complete book is available for only $2.99 on Amazon.

The Sixth Key – Your Sphere of Availability

Many books talk about the wonders of prayer but not about the pray-er’s limitations. In so doing, they set the reader up for failure.

We worship a God who is great and can do anything. Yet we ourselves are finite creatures, setting limitations on what we can receive through what’s called our Sphere of Availability.

The Sphere of Availability involves the truth that we can only attract as much as we’ve built a channel to attract. As we work on our lives and the areas where we want more goodness to manifest, more will be attracted as we move forward.

Consider a socially-awkward person who prays to find an ideal mate. This person is likely lonely, and being socially awkward would make this person less able to attract someone naturally.

This person’s prayer may likely not be answered by having his or her ideal dreamboat show up at the front door, because he or she may not have the social network to meet such a person, and even then the skill set to attract that person and seal the deal. Instead, this prayer may be answered by serendipitously finding a book or a YouTube video about how to talk to people. Further prayer may be answered by finding more friends and expanding his or her social network. Once those friendships are established and the skill set becomes a little more polished, then a potential romantic partner may appear.

You see this is a progression, a matter of steadily expanding the person’s Sphere of Availability through a combination of self-improvement and smaller prayers being answered over time. It’s when we recognize this pattern of improvement and availability that we can make the most out of effective prayer.

Consider likewise a person who wants a CEO job. If this person doesn’t have the skill set to be a CEO – finance, administration, leadership, and so forth – then praying for the job won’t go anywhere. And if for some reason such a prayer was answered (maybe to teach a lesson?), that person would fall flat on their face the first day on the job. Better to work on improving oneself first by way of schooling (insofar as possible), maybe even taking a few business classes for free on Alison, reading books on entrepreneurship and leadership, and experience by launching their own startup.

Granted, something like this may never lead to a CEO job at a Fortune 500 company, but by the time that startup is successful, why would you want to work for someone else anyway?

This is all there is to the Sphere of Availability, and it’s an important concept because it addresses the limitations we put on ourselves. If you want to expand the results you get from your prayer life, then work to enlarge your Sphere of Availability.

This was an excerpt from The Magic of Effective Prayer. The complete book is available for only $2.99 on Amazon.