Prayer and Action

I have often appreciated the power of prayer and awed in the stories of others positive experiences. Still, in my fallible human journey, it is often only after fact that I recognize my actions as being Godless, selfish, fear-based and driven by self will. It is often the consequences that result that make this evident and clear, but sometimes days later I will see how my actions may have affected others and I see how selfish I have been. Or in the case of my children, I see how my miss-guided works are establishing a poor model for them to base their behavior.
In contrast, I often will pray and meditate on a problem and ask for guidance, yet I will not take any action. True, sometimes no action is the best coarse action I am capable of; but, those times are not the times that trouble me when I reflect back on my day. It is the times that God makes clear the coarse I should take and I delay, postpone, or busy myself in other "good-works" to justify my inaction on what is truly pressing and most important.
In an ideal model of behavior, I should start each day with this sort of prayerful consideration and take the appropriate actions when necessary. And stay in this spiritual awareness mode as each new task is undertaken throughout the day. If only I had some type of buzzer that would sound to alert me that I am veering off the "spiritual beam". If it was obvious, this buzzer would not be needed, but too often, it is a gradual coarse adjustment which seems prudent in each of its small steps. As these adjustments accumulate, a simple correction in my daily flight path is not always clear or possible, At times like these, I am forced to either scrap several hours of progress and backtrack to get back in line with where I should be. My other option is to stop all together, regroup, and start on a new coarse to get back on track. This new coarse may hold great difficulties in rough terrain, foul weather, or navigating through uncharted waters. Too often I find myself unwittingly in this very predicament.