Prayer Journals

Since it's so difficult to concretely manifest a person's interaction with God, seeing how he's everywhere, yet he cannot be seen, touched, smelt, etc., I find it very interesting, and quite effective that members of the Vineyard are encouraged to keep this prayer journal. This tool, by writing down things they have asked for, or hoped for, and going back every once in a while to see which have been answered, allows for a quantitative manifestation of what would otherwise be seen as time-wasting meditation. However, all I have to say is that correlation does not mean causation. Just because a person prayed, and an event takes place, doesn't necessarily mean that the prayer caused the event to take place. Perhaps, from a goal-setting and visualization standpoint, manifesting something like a goal on an MCAT score by writing that goal down on a piece of paper would thus make the goal or desire concrete, and thus facilitate the person to achieving that goal. Such practices, goal setting of both short term and long term, are used all the time by athletes to promote not only looking for the end result, but also understanding the steps that need to be taken to achieve it. As a neuroscience major, and someone who understands some principles of motivational psychology, I would have to attribute the writing down of prayers to the psychological effects they pose towards a positive outcome, but wouldn't necessarily give them much concrete weight towards the power of God.... although correlation certainly doesn't rule out causation.