Every Night I Look at the Sky

   Call your name, and wonder why.

The other day, an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen for quite some time was soliciting for prayer. One of her friends had a very young child undergoing brain surgery the following day.

I feel like my gut reaction to this was sort of odd. Before sympathy kicked in, I felt a strange sense of obligation. As if I knew that if I ignored this plea, I’d be a terrible person.

It got me to thinking about prayer in general. Someone like me who has basically been raised in a church sanctuary has heard a lot about prayer. Yet, for all the theoretical information I have, prayer is still a huge mystery to me because God is still a huge mystery to me. And no matter how much I learn, He will always be a mystery. That is at once unsettling and comforting, a very uncommon mix of feelings for me.

Around tenth grade, like many others, I’m sure, at one time or another, I was stuck with the enlightenment that I’d been praying “wrong” all this time. That year in particular I’d been pretty diligent in bringing each of my petitions to God and leaving them there. To learn that prayer wasn’t about the getting things I asked for (however altruistic) actually sort of came as a surprise to me. If prayer isn’t a method of getting what I want from God, then what on earth is it? It made sense to later learn that it is a way of developing a relationship with God, who is not simply a holy wish-granter, arbitrarily deciding which prayers to “say yes” to.

My prayers changed after that, but another doubt began to surface. God knows our thoughts and feelings, our circumstances and how we’d like for them to turn out. God knows what we’re afraid of (even if we don’t) and what we’re happy about. It is written, though, For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. I could easily grasp that certain things had to be explicitly asked for, not just felt or thought about.

Relationship-prayer meant I had to be explicitly sharing not just my desires, but everything else, too. It felt strange to me to have to form all these thoughts and feelings into sentences and then direct them at God. I mean what was the point in internally verbalizing all these things He already knew?

Much of my bewilderment towards prayer was (and sometimes, is) hooked on that question, really: What’s the point?

In this time of speed and efficiency, I judge the value of my choices and activities based on what they cost me versus what I get out of them. For a lot of things, the payoff is purely internal (a “feeling of satisfaction”) but it is there and, in general, it is immediate.

That said, the mystery of prayer drives me nuts sometimes. Sooner or later, after years of praying for things, everyone comes to the same realization and that is that God doesn’t “say yes” to everything we beg Him for. Or, He does say yes, but not in the time frame we expect. The “payoff” of prayer is not always obvious or immediate. This is not, actually, the aspect of prayer that keeps me guessing. If I really do trust in the Almighty, I need to have faith in His wisdom. Although I sometimes struggle with impatience, I try to remain faithful. I engage in prayer to foster our relationship, not just to “get things”.

No, the huge questions I have about prayer probably try futilely to distill an act of faith down into a scientific formula or equation. This hasn’t worked much in the past, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering…

Take the baby with the brain tumour for instance. Undoubtedly, if her parents are the praying type, they were praying up a storm before, during, and after the surgery on their precious child. Is there any prayer more heartfelt than that of a mother for her child? In every way, the parents have more insight and investment into the situation (emotionally, medically, relationally, etc.) than someone like me has, a friend of a friend, who would have never even known about this sadness but for a quick message posted online.

My main question is, does a prayer from me change anything? I know that isn’t how I should be viewing prayer, but I do wonder. If two people pray for the same thing, something that is in line with God’s will, is the outcome any different than if just one person had prayed?

I’m reminded of one time when a friend of mine mentioned that her sister had a certain type of illness. Another friend, who had a medical background, asked her for more information so she could pray for specific things. I wondered then, would that make the prayer more effective? Have my prayers gone unanswered in the past because I was not specific enough? Or ignorant of the finer details? It was a scary thought.

Then there is the matter of persistence. Abraham persisted in haggling with God over how many righteous people it would take to save a city. He gets God down from fifty people to ten! Have my prayers gone unanswered in the past because I was not persistent enough?

Does it matter when we pray? Will a prayer for the baby’s surgery that occurs while she’s on the table be heard louder than the prayers said the night before?

Some things have so many people praying for them already that I find myself thinking that to pray for them myself would just be adding another drop to the ocean— an indistinguishable difference.

In thinking of the mother of the little girl, though, I put myself in her position. If it were my child in brain surgery, I would desperately, likely hysterically, ask for and accept the prayers of anyone willing to offer up even a few words of petition to God.

Once more, I am brought back to the truth that prayer is for relationship and not for results. I shouldn’t not pray for something because I feel it has “sufficient prayer cover”. Of course I prayed for the baby.

I don’t doubt the power of prayer. My hope is that I don’t get discouraged with it. Even if I don’t seem to be getting the answers I want, I am developing a relationship with God, and that is its own reward. The preachers will say that a prayer should be started with praise. Of reflection on the ways God has already been faithful and powerful. This isn’t to flatter God or butter him up so He’ll do what we want. In part, I think it is a reminder to us about the power we’re communing with so that we will have faith.

“Don’t tell God how big your storm is, tell the storm how big your God is.”