Answering God

Thinking about Eugene Peterson's Answering God – his premise is that you are speaking and we respond to what you are saying first to us.

I agree with that, but I also feel like my own praying has been changing slowly, where I am spending a lot of time thinking/praying out of a) gratitude, b) people (recent, on my mind), c) what's happening in our lives (work/church)... and then I'm opening Scripture. I'm not sure this is wrong (pretty sure it's not). But it feels different than simply starting from Scripture (more nuanced than what EP suggests – perhaps he's suggest that God is speaking from all those things, not just from Scripture, so it's still responding?)

Even if you start with Scripture, you still need to get to a, b, and c or your prayers will remain abstract and theoretical.