“Do your prayers get answered?” That was the first line of a note waiting for me one recent morning when I logged on to my e-mail account. It was a response from a friend who had told me, a day earlier, how he was anxious about an impending, crucial business meeting. I told my friend I’d be praying for him. He thanked me, but insisted he didn’t want to bother the Almighty. “How do you know your prayers get answered anyway?” he asked. In a series of exchanges that followed, I explained, as I understand it, that there is nothing too big or too seemingly trivial for God to care about; that prayer is us having a conversation with our Maker and that I didn’t think we could say anything that would make God stare blankly or throw up God’s hands and storm out of the room. Yet it still got me thinking: Why do we pray?

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)