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What do you do when your prayers don’t get answered? 

July 6, 2008  - Dale

What do you do when your prayers don’t get answered?  (a) Keep praying? (b) Stop praying?  (c) Pray for something else?  (d) Get angry?  (e) Tell God he owes you? (f) Give up?  (g) Answer the prayer yourself?  (h) Look for alternative sources of help? (i) agree that prayer is probably a pretend game? (j) Something else …

“Getting answers to prayers” often means, “getting God to do what we ask for”.   But that is making the playing field quite small.  It does not seem to give God much room to move. Even general prayers such as “Please help me” can carry our own un-stated assumptions about what kind of help we need – and when we need it.

Of course we are asking the question in a fairly mechanical way. What if we asked instead about when God does not respond to the person who is praying.  That is, what if  petitioners think that God has not replied to them? Like the people we send emails or smses to who don’t reply.  What do you do if you think God has not responded to your message?

Maybe changing the question like that doesn’t really help too much. It does move the discussion from “answers” to relationship, but the discussion is still centred on us. In a way that kind of discussion will not get very far because prayer depends on depending on God.

So when our prayers don’t seem to be answered, the first question is whether we can keep on depending on God.  But there is a second question connected with the kind of dependence we are thinking of. We could be depending on God as a sort of divine super-hero-rescuer. A sort of helpful person who can be relied on to rescue us no matter what.

But the God we pray to is not a super-hero. He is God. First of all we have to depend on him as the one who knows and rules everything. Who makes his own decisions about what is good and bad. That means that sometimes we need to change what we are asking for. Sometimes we just need to be patient and keep on asking and waiting. Always it means we can pray with confidence that he is able to do anything and will always act from love and mercy.

Often it will mean we are not sure what to ask for but can trust God to know – and to act in kindness.

Dale

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