The below is from chapter 21 of Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis, being an excerpt. At the end is my short conclusion. It is not that we are all in the place Lewis describes all the time . . . at any rate the writings of Lewis are so good because they come from a man who never pretended to be a deep theologian--just a layman who had his share of struggles and was wide open honest about them. Though at times the man is hard to understand (because he was so dadgum intelligent), he was real. Not always right, not always agreed with . . . but willing to risk his words on paper. Hopefully you will be encouraged by the below. Keep praying and doing all the other things that discipleship under Jesus entails.
Well, let's now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.
The odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is not confined to periods of dryness. When yesterday's prayers were full of comfort and exaltation, today's will still be felt as, in some degree, a burden.
Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered among duties at all. . . What can be done for--- or what should be done with--a rose-tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?
Much of our backwardness in prayer is no doubt due to our sins, as every teacher will tell us; to our avoidable immersion in the things of this world, to our neglect of mental discipline. And also to the very worst kind of "fear of God." We shrink from too naked a contact, because we are afraid of the divine demands upon us which it might make too audible. As some old writer says, many a Christian prays faintly "lest God might really hear him, which he, poor man, never intended."
If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other behaviours which now appear as duties. . . here is the paradox of Christianity. As practical imperatives for here and now the two great commandments have to be translated "Behave as if you loved God and man." For no man can love because he is told to. . . if a man really loved God and man, once again this would hardly be obedience; for if he did, he would be unable to help it.
I am therefore not really deeply worried by the fact that prayer is at present a duty, and even an irksome one. This is humiliating. It is frustrating. It is terribly time-wasting--the worse one is praying, the longer one's prayers take. But we are still only at school. . . I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling . . . these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. . . God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.
My Conclusion: Though a bit simplistic it seems to me that we don't always feel like loving or praying or giving or doing a host of other things that are good and right to do, even required by God. But we do them as sheer acts of the will. If everything is left to our feelings (emotions) I am afraid that what will be left behind is a long line of shipwrecks and disasters for ourselves and others. Our faith will probably perish if left to our emotions. After all, it is doing the will of God that is all important and necessary according to Jesus. He says little or perhaps nothing at all about doing what is right and just because we feel like it-- though sometimes we do.
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