I have a confession: Sometimes I don’t know why I pray.
That is, I know what I want to accomplish when I pray. I understand the desired outcome of my prayers, but often even as I speak the words I wonder what I’m doing it for.
Some days I question the whole system.
One of the most common prayers Christians engage in is called Intercessory Prayer; prayer on behalf of another. These are times we lift-up others who are dealing with illness, struggle, grief, or indecision. We ask God for help in another person’s circumstance.
It’s definitely the social media prayer of choice; the offering we readily drop in comment sections in the face of job loss, death, troublesome children, and flat tires: I’ll pray for you.
(Whether we all actually follow-through on these prayers is another matter for another day).
I pray earnestly for people all the time and I both openly solicit and sincerely treasure prayer from others on my behalf.
Lately I’m just not sure what all this really accomplishes, or if it works, just how and when it works.
Of course when we pray for someone it makes them feel good, knowing that somebody else cares for and stands alongside them. I know that it also places us in a state of dependence on God, as we ask for Divine assistance in things that are beyond our control and above our pay grade.
Beyond these things, can we reasonably expect that our prayers can do what they seem to want to do: change the mind of the Creator of the Universe?
I think part of the problem is the way we’ve spoken about and thought about prayer for the past few decades. We’ve set-up a cause and effect relationship between our prayers and the results of those prayers; using a corporate measurement for a spiritual practice.
We’ve all seen the FB requests, that if we can “just get more people praying” about this or that, then we “know that it will be accomplished”.
Is that really what we believe? Is that even Biblical? Is this all a numbers game?
To me that sounds more like God’s Kickstarter Campaign, where He says to humanity, “Listen, I know you really want me to heal Jerry, father of 5 from Topeka who has terminal cancer, but you only have 3,486 people praying for him, and I really need 283 more to move on this thing.”
Is that what we think about a loving, all-powerful Creator; that He’s just an easily swayed supernatural number-cruncher, sitting back weighing lives and circumstances, and waiting for us to pray hard enough or often enough or in large enough numbers to finally step-in?
With enough petitions from His people, is God really going to heal Jerry, while across town Dennis, an equally faithful, equally loving, equally sick father, is doomed to die because he only has a handful of people praying on his behalf? Were their prayers not genuine enough or passionate enough or desperate enough to merit God’s movement? What about Bill, who has no one praying for Him? Is he unseen and unknown to God?
Not only does this flawed prayer mindset skew our idea of the character of God, it also straps those who pray with an impossible burden—that of steering the Almighty’s healing hand, of swaying the Creator of the Universe.
I’ll be honest, that just doesn’t feel right in my spirit.
Here’s what I do know about prayer and about the situations and people we pray for:
Sometimes God heals and sometimes He doesn’t.
Sometimes the sick kid gets better and sometimes she doesn’t.
Sometimes the marriage survives and sometimes it crumbles.
Sometimes there is a miracle and sometimes a memorial.
Through it all, I know God controls it all, yet I’m not sure how our prayers might tip those scales in either direction. I wish I was.
I won’t stop praying. As a believer, I can’t not pray; it’s just what I do instinctively.
It’s something I know that I (that we) need to do, the same way we need to breathe and eat and sleep.
Right now I’m just trying to unlearn some things that my tradition or the consumer Christian culture may have unknowingly taught me about prayer and to help me make peace with the process.
I’m trying to understand just how this conversation with God thing really works.
Guess I just need prayer.
