Lift Up the Receiver, I’ll Make You a Believer | Prayer – Part 1

Prayer is something I have struggled with throughout my life. I do believe in the power of prayer, but at the same time, it is something I don’t really get, and I have felt cynical about it in the past. I’ve found prayer to have been amazing and life affirming, but I have also found it stressful and anxiety inducing. I’ve seen prayers that have apparently been answered, but I have also seen the disappointment and sorrow caused by unanswered prayers.

 

Prayer is really complicated to me.

 

The times I have felt closest to God have often been when alone in prayer, and I regret that I don’t make the time for private prayer time as much as I should, but life does get in the way, and I don’t always feel like I’ve got a spare half an hour to sit in prayerful contemplation or meditation, or in other words, I haven’t been disciplined and made time for significant time for prayer in my life. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, and that I’m among hordes of Christian’s who are busied with life, and whose prayer life is basically short bullet prayers which are uttered throughout the day, in brief moments of need or gratitude, when we remember. I feel this is a shame because I find these extended times of purposeful prayer easier, and also because the only other times I deliberately set out to pray, is with other people in church or in community groups, or small groups, or whatever you call them, which I find much more difficult.

 

I’ve always felt self-conscious about speaking in front of other people, and this has been no different when it comes to prayer. I always felt that my prayers were fairly basic compared to those of others, who were quite eloquent and could speak amazing, impressive prayers. I know this shouldn’t matter, and that the Bible even warns people of praying extravagantly in public, see Matthew 6:5-8, but even now, it still bothers me. If I pray for someone then I want it to be meaningful or make a difference for them, and so I feel the need to provide a good prayer, that satisfies the person I’m praying for, somehow. This may be because I’ve often felt short changed when people have prayed for me. I usually only ask for prayer when it’s for something that really matters to me, or for something that I really need prayer for, and so if I put myself out there and only get a basic, casually uttered prayer in return for my vulnerability, then I worry that the prayer won’t register on God’s radar, or Praydar, as I think we should call it.

 

When it comes down to it, I don’t really believe that this is how prayer works. I believe that all our prayers register on the Praydar, and that God hears our prayers, regardless of how articulate or comprehensive they are, but it’s not how I feel when I’m praying with other, presumably better Christians. If I’m in a group prayer situation, then I can guarantee that I will not be spiritually focused on the communal act of prayer. I will be thinking of something good to pray, and planning how soon I can get to say it, because until I figure out what it is I will pray and say it, there’s a chance that someone will steal my idea, and I’ll have to think of something new and original to pray.

 

Praying for others on a one-to-one basis is slightly less stressful, there isn’t any chance of having your prayer stolen, but there is still the pressure of what you actually pray. Let’s say that you have a friend whose mum is suffering from depression. Do you pray boldly that God will heal her and take away her depression? Do you hedge your bets and simply pray for God to be in that situation, and to guide the people who are caring for her, and that healing will come through their medical knowledge? Or do you pray something neutral which doesn’t set anyone up for disappointment, maybe asking for peace for your friend and his family, or that they will turn to God for comfort? Will God act according to whichever prayer is prayed in that moment? If you pray for successful medical intervention, then will God place the mum’s mental health in the hands of the doctors, and withhold divine healing because it wasn’t requested? If you simply pray for peace in that situation, then will God grant peace, but leave the care of the mum to medical science alone? Will God step in if we pray the wrong thing, or auto correct the mistakes we make in our prayers, or is God bound by what we ask? Does God even take notice of our prayers, or does he just do what he wants?

 

Let’s say that you pray boldly for healing, as we are often told to do, when it comes to prayer. If you prayed that God would heal your friend’s mum of her mental illness, that her depression would completely disappear, and it would be replaced with peace and hope for the future, then what does it mean if she isn’t healed, and actually, she gets worse, and eventually takes her own life? Did God hear those prayers and decide that on this occasion, he wasn’t going to do anything, or he allowed it to happen, because it was for some kind of greater good?

 

I use the example of the mum with depression, because this is my story, in this scenario, it was my mum who was ill with depression. I’m pretty sure that all these different kinds of prayer were spoken over me and my family, and yet she wasn’t healed, she remained mentally unstable throughout her life, and her illness caused a lot of pain and heartache within our family. And when she finally lost the battle with her illness and took her own life, she was alone because she had walked away from everyone who ever cared for her, because she believed that they were against her. When it came to prayer, all the bases were covered, but none of the prayers made any apparent difference, to her or to us as a family. I know I’m not unique in my story, and I’m sure we’ve all struggled with the consequences of unanswered prayer.

 

Or are they actually unanswered prayers?

 

I’ve heard people say that God does answer all our prayers, however, we don’t always get what we want, and sometimes his answer to our prayer is “No”.

 

I’ve heard it said that God also sometimes answers “wait” or “not yet”. This is apparently more relevant to some situations than others. It doesn’t really make sense in my story, unless God’s answer to healing my mum was “not yet”, followed by a hard “no”.

 

If we believe in the power of prayer, and we believe that God lovingly hears all our prayers, then this is a double-edged sword. We can be reassured that God is with us, and is an active presence working in our lives, but if God answers our prayers with a “no” then we are usually offered two reasons why. The first is that the thing we asked for was not according to God’s divine plan, that there is some incomprehensible reason why the answer can’t be “Yes”, and the second, is that our faith was lacking, and we didn’t believe in the power of prayer enough, for God to do anything. The first explanation of the “No” is obviously easier to swallow. God chose not to do what we asked, because it just couldn’t be, for reasons that we don’t get to understand. Perhaps down to some kind of butterfly effect situation, that if someone is healed or someone gets the job they wanted, then that answered prayer could result in a major health pandemic, or the pope getting assassinated. Whilst it can be frustrating, I guess this answer allows us to enter into awe and invites us to engage with the mystery of God, so that’s something, I guess. The second explanation is more difficult to accept. God chose not to answer my prayer because of my lack of faith and my disbelief, or to put it another way, God said “No” because I was not good enough, my faith was insufficient, and the prayer not being answered is basically my fault.

 

In the past I used to get angry when I heard people give testimonies about answers to prayer, which seemed utterly inconsequential, in comparison to other things like healing or intervention into difficult circumstances. I’ve heard testimonies of answered prayer about small things, such as a mother who prayed for a parking space at the supermarket one day, when she was particularly stressed out with her kids, and that God provided a space as soon as she had finished praying; through to bigger things, like a man who prayed for the money to buy his dream yacht, and the next day was given the exact amount of money to pay for the yacht he wanted. Whilst these things might seem small and ridiculous to me, I don’t think that they are entirely unimportant, those answers to prayer obviously meant something to those people, and had implications for them that I don’t understand, but if it came down to my mum being healed of her depression, and all that would have meant for us as a family, and whether someone was given a parking space or the cash to buy a yacht that they probably didn’t really need, then surely my mum’s mental health was more important to God.

 

I don’t really buy the second explanation, that our prayers aren’t answered because of our lack of faith. When it came to what happened to my Mum, there were so many people who prayed for her and for our situation, people who I knew were strong in their faith. I don’t think her not being healed was due to the faithlessness of those who prayed. Which means that there must be some unknowable reason why our prayers cannot be answered, as we want them to be. Maybe God doesn’t answer “Yes” to our prayers, because he wants us to learn something about ourselves, or grow in our faith by living through a particular experience. That kind of makes sense, right?!

 

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music