Soon after my husband Ron suddenly lost his eyesight we went to the Braille Institute, which offers many helpful services for blind people. I was trying to lead him by the hand into the building.
The changing shadows and the rough and smooth textured sidewalks frightened him, certain I was leading him into an obstacle he would trip over.
I kept saying, “Trust me. Just trust me.”
But he was terrified as we walked from the sunlight into the shadows, and from darkness back into the light again. I kept reassuring him, “The sidewalk is clear.”
He still didn’t believe me, and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t trust me to safely guide him.
As we inched our way into one of the rooms, both of us feeling forlorn and frightened, Pablo, one of the employees introduced himself and said, “Let me show you how to guide him.”
Pablo told us about his grandmother who was blind as he showed me that Ron needed to hold onto my arm instead of trying to pull him along by the hand as I was doing.
When it comes to prayer, do you ever have problems trusting God to safely guide you? Do you feel as if you are stumbling into obstacles? Do you struggle knowing how to pray or you think your faith is weak? Are you afraid to trust God to guide you through the dark places?
I’ve been a Christian for fifty-two years, but I sometimes feel blind and lost. I still struggle with doubt and trusting the Lord. I don’t see how He will guide us when so many obstacles block the pathway ahead of us.
I also struggle with prayerlessness. During my devotions, I pray as I read. But I don’t pray using a list of requests. Some days, I am in an attitude of prayer and constantly seek the Lord’s guidance and intercede for others as I am working. I pray as the Lord brings people to mind, which He often does. Other days hours slip by without praying. I don’t pray as much as I should for our church or missions or the needs of the world at large.
I also struggle with feelings of spiritual failure when I read books about the kind of prayer-life I should have. Some books on prayer claim spectacular answers, numbers of people saved, great financial and personal successes, phenomenal church growth. The bigger the answers the better our prayer-life others seem to say, which only makes me question if my faith is weak.
When I read the lists of sins that prevent God from answering prayer I feel even more defeated. I am left with the impression that none of my prayers will be answered unless I am a sin-free saint. Until I conquer all the sins in my life, the Lord can’t or won’t respond to my requests.
I struggle with questions about prayer. What about Christians who have seen many ordinary answers to prayer but have been waiting for years to see their most important requests fulfilled? Waiting can break your heart. And what about prayers that were answered with a resounding, “No”? We question, what’s wrong with us and our faith that we don’t see the same kinds of spectacular “yes” answers as claimed in books or testimonies?
Many Christians struggle with prayer because they are told they should make specific requests or their prayers won’t be answered. But they honestly don’t know what to ask of the Lord.
We struggle with hindrances to prayer. Our fast-paced life is one. Our society places a high value on work productivity and instantaneous results. We must get the job done and it must be done now. Our jobs become all consuming, so we don’t feel we have time to pray.
We highly value personal rights and pleasures that consume our lives and keep us from prayer. Television also leaves us with the false impression that solutions are found and problems solved in thirty to sixty minutes. But the answers we desperately need may not come easily or quickly.
Moreover, prayer may seem like a waste of time considering medicine, science, technology, and even the internet that we can rely on for answers to solve problems. Why pray when we have so many resources to help us?
Others question that prayer works because they feel God has abandoned them as Job did when he prayed, “I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me” (Job 30:20). Still others are convinced that the Lord cannot forgive their sins or they’re not worthy enough for Him to answer.
We may feel as if God is deaf to our pleas, has hidden his face from us, or even rejected us (Ps. 39:12, 88:14). When heartaches become worse, we become disappointed in God and can’t understand where He is or why He doesn’t intervene. We also feel guilty because we’re so quick to pray in an emergency and so slow to pray when all is well.
We feel ashamed that we haven’t been praying as we should or hard enough or with enough faith. We may think that if we were a better Christian and had a powerful prayer-life this tragedy wouldn’t have happened to us.
So the cycle of guilt and failure about prayer continues. That’s certainly been true of me. But I am convinced that I am not alone in my struggles. One of the best-kept secrets among Christians is our sense of failure about prayer.
I can hear a vast array of Christians breathing a collective sigh relief that someone has said what we could never say aloud. We feel as if we’re the only ones who are poor pray-ers. If we ever admitted our feelings of inadequacy about prayer, we fear more pious Christians’d criticize us, or we don’t want others to think that we’re not as good or spiritual as we appear to be. We’d like to have a better prayer-life, but the fact is we don’t. That’s reality!
If you can relate to the struggles I have in praying, then you may find hope here. I’ve discovered that prayer is so much more than talking to God, asking and trusting Him to meet my needs. I have been greatly encouraged as I have discovered God’s role in prayer, the Spirit’s help in prayer, and how Jesus prays for us.
I have come to realize that I cannot maintain a prayer-life on my own. God initiates and sustains prayer. It’s is a “full circle of communication.” (Walter Wangerin, 41). Prayer is an ongoing dialogue between God and His beloved friends.
Once we realize that God initiates communication with us, we won’t be so discouraged by feelings of inadequacy about our prayer-life. We will be built up in our faith as we rely on His Spirit to pray with and for us.
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