Prayer and the Fidelity Arrow

I worked for a time for a popular Unity prayer line and learned a few things about the way that we "do" prayer. One thing that was obvious from the beginning was that we pray "from" God and not "to" God. That said, one of my favorite prayers that we used was like this:

The Spirit of The Lord goes before you and makes your way easy and successful. 

The concept of this always reminded me of the Fidelity commericial. In this commericial for financial planning, the green arrow which created a line would just "show up" going before the person, showing them the right way. This God outside of ourselves, moving forward like a green arrow, fixing things prior to our arrival, feels oddly like a fairy tale. There's a magical God outside of ourselves going ahead of us, which assumes that God is not only an outside entitiy, but an outside entity that lives in the future, knows what we are going to do, and also, this entity can change the way things are going to be in our favor. When you are praying for success and in this case, when you really need a win, there's nothing more comforting than feeling like something will go before you and fix everything. 

Shall we pray to God's Presence and Power in the Cosmos, opening ourselves to the infilling of Spirit? Or Shall we center on the Spirit within, allowing it to emerge?

We are Unity after all, so we ask ourselves - how would Myrtle do this? Which one did she do? When you consider her, sitting in her chair, with a picture of Jesus in the other chair, the answer does seem to be that she prayed to God and certainly not from God. But the evolution of her consciousness includes the fact that she prayed from the space of God over time. "I am a child of God and do not inherit sickness" was her affirmation and being a child of God does imply that in time she would become a God. Kittens become cats when they grow up, and would it be any different for children of God? Is this not praying from the essense of the divinity that she is?

Of all of the ways that we look at prayer, I can't say with any great certainity that I would completely leave out the idea that we don't pray to the prescence in the cosmos. I may have all of the parts of God, but I have never created a planet. I have not nor do I know any other humans who have created a seperate species of beings that can live outside themselves. (Children not included.) Sometimes, in certain situations, it is nice to think that there is a presence so much greater than myself that I can give my now seemingly insigifigant problem in the face of the cosmos. If God is all powerful and all present, can't I turn over my challenges to this part of myself?  Some people have great success with this method of prayer, of praying to this being.

Theological questions tend to bring up more questions. Growing up Unity, I do remember certain points in my growing up years that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I could feel something completely, visualize it, I could create whatever "it" was. The magic side of focusing on that Spirit within can mean that you have great material success.  When we pray, we are trying to touch the Absolute. We are taking something grand and using it to create the life that we desire. We are molding the world we live in with the very substance of the Divine. Sometimes this requires using the idea of a great big God with skin on. Sometimes it means going within and living from that space. If both work for different people at different times, we have to accept that the answer isn't as simple as one or the other. Sometimes it's nice to think of a God that goes before you, like the Fidelity arrow, fixing everything along the way, and it is good be the one fixing everything, to be that empowered, as children of God, we are in training apparently, to be the "real thing".