Why does God care if I pray?

Note: This is one of my religious posts. It is based on my understanding of and suppositions about the doctrines of my denomination: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My claims may or may not be doctrinally accurate.

Why does God ask us to pray? To read His word? To be baptized? To keep the Sabbath day holy? To refrain from misusing His name? What is the point? What does it do? If we believe Him to be perfectly humble and holy, then He does not need these things for Himself. He is self-sufficient. They must be for us, to help us get to heaven. But how?

I’ve heard people say that when you don’t pray for a while, it feels to God like you’re on a trip, but never call your parents. I don’t really buy this one, because God is aware of our every breath, our every thought. He doesn’t need us to reach out in order to know what’s going on in our life. He doesn’t need to feel warm and fuzzy because His children chose to call Him up. It must help us somehow. I believe it helps us remember Him, but what does that do?

There are many such commandments, that through my life I have tried to follow, and yet they do not accomplish any obvious goal. What does God ultimately want to accomplish here? He wants us to go to heaven, but he could just take us there, if the location was the goal. He wants us to be heavenly. He wants us to be happy. This is what I think, anyway. He wants us to learn to do heavenly things and happy things. What things are those? Is it reading the bible that is so heavenly? Is being baptized that is so happy? I don’t think so. Not directly.

It is to serve.

In the end, I believe all the humility, and the faith, hope, and charity, all the piety leads us to be servants. To learn to bring God in your life helps you serve.

And yet there is one more piece. To be free of the burden of flaws. Sins, inconsistencies, disobediences always bring pain and weight to the soul, which are somewhat possible to hide, but impossible for us to remove. In the end, we depend on Christ to remove those burdens, not only so that we can be freer to serve, but as a good thing in and of itself. The ultimate act of selflessness, which allows us to become more holy. And we cannot do any of this alone. It impossible to be free of burden without turning to Christ, which we can do by these acts. And after becoming a new creature in Christ, we can then become perfect servants of God and our fellow man.