Take it personal…

I was on my way to Men's Breakfast the other day. Since breakfast starts at 7:00 and I live many miles away, my day started awfully early. I pulled into a convenience store at 6:05 to get my first daily dose of Diet Coke. As I got out of the car and walked to the door, I noticed a man inside, standing by the dustiest rack of merchandise in any convenience store.
The greeting card rack.
It's one spinner rack with a couple dozen forlorn cards on it. They feature bad artwork, cheesy sentiments, and usually begin with something like:

Howdy! We're thinkin' 'bout you here in

DRIPPING SPRINGS, TX

where the town name is in a different font from the rest of the card.
At a glance, I'm pretty sure I perceived the whole story. Here's a businessman in a starched white shirt, in a convenience store which has just opened five minutes before, and he's searching for a card. Somebody forgot the wife's birthday, right?
My heart went out to the guy. He'd completely forgotten this big day and now his options were exceedingly limited. Unless his wife really, REALLY loved beef jerky and energy drinks, there weren't many gifts he could purchase for her in this particular retail establishment that would earn him high marks for his thoughtfulness. When I'd purchased my soda and returned to my car, I could see he was still there, turning that rack, hoping that something beautiful and romantic and endearing would miraculously appear, instead of yet another card with a hillbilly and an outhouse on the front.
My advice to the guy would have been to buy a pack of index cards and a Sharpie and write on each card a reason he loved his wife. Or tie a ribbon around his waist and slap a bow on his head. Or leave a trail of Junior Mints around the house, leading to a paper that says, "I MINT it when I said I loved you."
But some of us aren't comfortable with our own words. We think someone else can say it better than we can; that's why the greeting card industry is so huge.
It's like when we pray. When you go home, you probably don't say, "My dear earthly wife, hallowed be this, the day of thy birth." Why, then, do we trot out the King James-ian lingo when we talk to God? Flowering up our speech is merely an indication that we don't know what to say. But all God wants is to hear from our hearts, complete with stuttering and stumbling and long pauses and moans of frustration and pain.
If you want 'em to be personal, to be saved, to be cherished, prayers—like greeting cards—should be homemade.