perhaps he did not yet reveal himself to you. frankly I prayed to him the first time for real long before i became a Christian because I feared that hell was real and I did not want to go there. during that time i was very confused person and thought that i may have been gay. it was a couple of years later that he revealed himself to me which i told him to leave me alone and then he revealed himself later for good by showing me who Jesus was as I lay on my bed. I was bedridden because of a severe aneurysm I had from which i could not speak at the time but i had later recovered. the key to faith is knowing he is there always listening always watching always understanding and that he loves you and wants best for you. its as simple as that. he can speak to you in many ways either audibly where you hear him although this has only ever happened in my life once when something he told me would happen was just too strange for me to believe. most of the time he speaks to me through my own thoughts where for instance i would think of how much a good person i am and immediately i would get a remembrance of what i did last week that was bad. other times as a soft voice in my head when i think about what to do and sometimes rarely only once i had what is known as a vision where in my minds eye i could see what would occur in the future but this is because i asked him to show me what a vision looks like since i was curious.