Heavy Prayers
Have you ever felt afraid to pray? You know, that you don’t have enough faith to ask God for what you really want? Or maybe that if you did dare to ask God for that really big thing and He doesn’t answer the way you need Him to, then maybe He isn’t the good God you thought He was?
Jesus said that all it takes is to have faith the size of a mustard seed. He also said we don’t have because we don’t ask. And then He also taught that we could ask anything in His name and that it will be done.
But, how do we handle it when we do believe, we do pray and He doesn’t grant us the desperate prayer we prayed in His name?
For me, I wonder more if it was my fault. I didn’t pray hard enough, my faith wasn’t strong enough, my belief wasn’t enough. If I am completely transparent, I am too scared to fault God. I don’t want to impugn His character. The scriptures tell me He is good and He does good, so if there is to be some blame to place, it should most definitely be placed on my weaknesses and shortcomings.
When the trials and tribulations of life come, and I have sought the answers in prayer for my loved ones, the justice for the hurt ones, the healing for the sick ones, but God says not that way, not right now, no, just no - I scratch my head. I ask, “Why? “ I feel helpless, and I wonder what was the point of my pleading prayers. There forms, deep within my chest a dull, physical ache, a truly heavy heart.
This fall I have prayed, pleading for the healing of not one, but two of my friends’ adult sons. Both young men, fathers and husbands and Christ followers. Yet, God healed their bodies by calling them to their eternal homes. Their mothers, fathers, siblings, wives and children are dealing with a loss that I can only imagine.
I find myself surrounded by other godly men and good women who are carrying cancer diagnosis’s and monstrous marriages. The government shutdown has caused understandable anxiety and significant stress, not for unknown masses, but for real people, specific families that I personally know and can actually name. It isn’t the news cycle, or something happening to someone else somewhere far away. These are my co-workers, my church family, my friends, my kin.
It has been a heavy season for so very many for some very hard, very real, reasons. The only response I know to do, in the face of this oppressing darkness is to pray - yet, are the prayers working? Are they being heard when they aren’t being granted? Who is lacking the faith? Where is the problem? Why? Should I even continue to pray?
I found myself asking all these questions and even more. If I am honest with myself, I do wrestle with my understanding of Who I know my God to be - but - I know of no other place under heaven to go, to turn to or to seek intervention. So, I have continued to pray.
Then, as I was doing my Bible reading, I noticed something I had never really thought through before. Jesus, as He prayed in the garden before His arrest, His trials, His beatings and His eventual crucifixion - knowingly, desperately, sincerely prayed a prayer that God the Father would answer with, “no.” Jesus, with all His foreknowledge, with His perfect faith, and with His ultimate understanding of God’s will still prayed so hard His body literally produced sweat drops of blood. And His Father still did not relent. There was no other way and Jesus faced the cross.
I shared this observation with one of the mothers I mentioned above, who mere weeks prior, buried her first-born. I had hoped to be encouraging, that if even Jesus prayed prayers that were answered with “no,” then _____. But I couldn’t fill in that blank. The words wouldn’t come. Her response to me is still echoing in my ears. “We have to zoom out and look at the bigger picture,” she said to me.
As a result, I have done that. I looked at Jesus’ prayer in a big picture kind of way. This is what I found:
Jesus prayed, teaching us how to pray. He showed us that it is okay to be honest with our Heavenly Father. He knows the desires of our hearts anyway, why not tell Him?
He displayed that prayer is a place that we can be raw with our feelings. Our God is big enough to handle them. We can’t hurt His feelings. Jesus may not have doubted, but our God wants to be with us in our desperations and doubts.
He modeled how to respond in faith and in obedience even and especially when we desperately want there to be another way, any other way.
God the Father, didn’t leave Jesus and He won’t leave us either. His character, His goodness can still be trusted.
If Jesus prayed when things couldn’t be more heavy, then I will too. If Jesus prayed when He knew the answer would be “no",” then I will too - especially because I don’t know what the answer will be. If Jesus trusted the bigger picture outcome of His prayers, then I will ask that same God for the faith to trust Him with the outcomes of my heavy prayers too.
