PRAYER - help in our weakness

Here's an exerpt from a really cool book on prayer I'm reading...

"- I don't seem to have any real desire for prayer
- I do it more out of a sense of duty than anything else'
- when I pray I feel as though God is a million miles away. I don't seem to have any real assurance that He hears me, and that I am truly talking to Him
- I pray but nothing seems to happen. I get so discouraged and feel, What's the use?
- I suffer from wandering thoughts in prayer and cannot seem to concentrate.

Scripture: "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words..." Rom 8:26

... How wonderful it is when we discover, often through the discipline of repeated failure, that this weakness, with which we seem to be permanently saddled is not "the end", but a new and wonderful beginning - the gateway to heaven's resources. "The Spirit helps us in our weakness." The weakness is perpetual only that we might be perpetually dependent on the Holy Spirit"

Source: Pray in the Spirit by Arthur Wallis.