As a Catholic, in any discernment process, one must ask two questions about the ways that I pray:

1.  Am I doing private prayer? Prayer which calls me individually into a deeper relationship with my Lord and Savior? Prayer that calls me to set time aside regularly so as to grow deeper in love with God?

2.  Am I doing community prayer? Healthy, balanced prayer discernment as a Catholic cannot happen outside of my relationship with my community? Prayer calls me to set aside time each week to grow deeper with God in relation to my sisters and brothers in Christ? The normative experience would be at the Sunday Eucharist with my community.

If you want to know what God wants, you have to talk to Him. You have to pray. God's will, His plan for us, does not happen without our freely chosen cooperation. To build a friendship with God works the same way that it does between two people who want to become friends. Talking, listening, spending time together, learning about each other, sticking it out in good times and bad: all of these are normal parts of a human friendship, why should it be any less with God?

Prayer is, most simply put, talking with God. It is the form of communication that hooks us into the spiritual realm. Everyone knows about it at some level, whether they choose to admit to it or not, and usually, like every other skill in life, it takes practice to figure out how it works. So practice makes perfect fits well with this subject.

If God designed it so that every person He creates has a unique personal vocation for this life, then certainly He must have the information on how we are to figure it out. A manufacturer always has a manual for his created machine. Prayer, then, is the way we communicate with God in order to learn what that special purpose is in our life.   His plan will always be the perfect and most satisfying one for us. Many people are quick to believe that they can figure it out for themselves without the manual, but in the end they will never have mastered its use as much as if they had just patiently worked it out with God.

If someone said they were going to buy a car but had never talked to the owner before buying it, we would say that person had made a poor decision.   The same goes for learning about one's vocation.   If we want the best and most fulfilled life, we need to talk to the perfect Creator and Designer.