Prayer, is it a waste of time? Or is it one of the most direct ways we can come to know our God?

I was thinking about prayer the other day. I was thinking about how it fits into the busy lives of Americans. Or the way it does'nt fit into the lives of most Americans. With work, paying bills, getting the kids to and from soccer practice, and the general hustle and bustle do we take the time out of this to give to God? I have noticed an increassing ammount of things piling up on my plate and have noticed that when things get really heavy and I get really stressed out at the end of the day the last thing on my mind is prayer. When in actuality that should be the first, second, and third thing on my mind. I should be asking God to guide me through these times and to help me keep my sanity, but instead I focus on what I need to do. That is entirely the wrong thing to focus on. I think that a lot of us loose the ability to give ourselves wholey to God, and we instead work on everything on our own and we do not let him have any part of it. When we do this we are setting ourselves up for failure. Without God we are nothing, and the things we try and do without God also become nothing. We need to offer ourselves to the Father and let him take total control of our lives. You can think of it this way, remember when you were a kid and you were just learning how to ride a bike? You probably had training wheels on you bike to help keep you from falling, and a few of the very first times you rode you had either your Mother or Father behind you pushing you along and helping you get going. We can kind of think of our life like learning to ride a bike. At first when we start out we are wobbly and all over the place until we learn to trust in out training wheels. This can be viewed as us learning to live in this world of sin. We are wobbly and we fall into sin, and we do things that are not glorifying to God. Then we learn to trust in our savior, and the redemption earned for us by his dying on the cross. Then an we get older we begin riding our bike faster! Doing more things, going different places and we are ready to get rid of the completley embarrassing and out-dated training wheels. We start going faster, school is starting to get very stressful and we are making all kinds of new friends, especially that one of the opposite sex who keeps looking over here at us. Then we soon realize that we are pretty self sufficient without our training wheels and we can do pretty well without them so we start falling even farther away from the things that helped us get going like God, and Mass and so on. Then one day we are crusing down a steep hill, doing well, no one helping us just all on our own when all of a sudden we hit something. We don't even see it coming, and we crash hard. After a small recovery we begin to think and wonder what happened that made us crash. What did we do? I'm a good rider, I have'nt crashed in years, but once we think harder and harder we realize that we lost something. Maybe we lost focus of what er were doing or what was around us and that's why we crashed. Or maybe we turned our back on something and it came back to get us. The main thing is, something is wrong. Now in the spiritual life we can look at this and see that we fell, either into sin, or we fell into hard times, or we can even be feeling that we are worthless and that there is really no reason for us to be here. After we fall what do we do? Do we brush ourselves off and think that we just need to pay more attention to things? Or do we stop and think that whatever we have just encountered is something from God. Be it good or bad. If we do not understand what is going on or why something in our life has happened the way it has then we should ask God to show us what has happened. Or why it has happened. When we pray to God we get to learn all kinds of things. Things that we otherwise would be troubled by, or totally confused by. When we pray we develop a a strong relationship with God and we begin to see this world with a more clear view, and a sturdier grip on reality. After we have established this relationship with God we need to keep it alive and strong. We need to keep talking with him and we need to become more and more open to him and with him. Once we do that I think that the purpose of prayer, and the meaning of it will come much more easy, and we can then answer the question, is it a waste of time? Or is it one of the most direct ways we can get to know our God?