Prayer is not the private, highly individual thing wethought it was. There is a work crew that assembles when we pray. Or, say rather, a dream team: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God invites us –in all our weakness – to join his team.

Prayer, as Paul thought of it, is more like basketball than archery. It’s done as a team. We don’t stand alone aiming at a target. Instead, we work the prayer down the court toward the goal. It doesn’t all depends on us—and we should never think it does. That would be like playing in a three-on-three basketball tournament with teammates LeBron James, Stephan Curry, and Nikalo Jokic, and thinking that it all rests on me! We need the team as we pray. Without God’s help, we’ll never move our prayers toward the target.