Prayer in its specialized sense means turning our hearts and minds to God. Prayer in its widest sense means directing our whole lives to God. Everything falls under this definition: work, play, joy, sorrow, health, sickness, our whole selves and the circumstances in which we live. But if we are to direct our lives to God we must see life as it really is—God's plan to enable us to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him for ever in heaven. Any conflict in our minds here is fatal. “We need to see life as a whole, not divided into watertight compartments of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ or ‘indifferent', but as God's will being worked out by us, here and now, in everything. It means co-ordinating the bits and pieces that make up everyday lite into one harmonious whole, knit together by the simple desire of pleasing God at all times and seeing his hand in all things.