The Problem With Prayer
I bet you know what it is.
I’m a realist.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
I didn’t grow up in a praying family.
We didn’t bless the food before meals.
If we wanted to thank someone for the meals we would thank Mom. She was sitting right there at the table.
When I saw people pray or had to pause for prayer in some public place I equated this with taking a “Time Out.”
Even after becoming a Christian, having had no training or lessons up to that point, I still didn’t really understand, and therefore, couldn’t really appreciate the value or importance of prayer.
And there was another perplexity to prayer for me.
It didn’t seem to work.
There was no obvious cause-and-effect to it.
You could not prove it worked even if in a particular instance it seemed to.
What if it was just a coincidence that someone prayed and the next moment some crippled person stood up and walked?
And even if you were convinced, by the time you told a few skeptics with the gift of pooh-pooping, your balloon of wonder was pricked and you settled back to believing prayer was just for wimps and sissies.
I’m still a realist,
but now I have a broader and deeper view of what is and is not real.
Real is no longer a synonym for visible or obvious.
Now I understand that our physical world is made up of atoms.
Sounds are made up of waves.
Radios receive and project wave transmissions that may have originated from anywhere else in the world or coming back from probes we sent into space.
Plus stars and other objects in the sky generate their own transmissions.
We see — thanks to light waves and eyes connected to sophisticated neural networks in brains we happen to have but didn’t make ourselves.
And for the gravitational forces to explain the expansion of the universe I understand we have to calculate in dark forces and dark matter which we cannot detect with any instrument so far invented — and it turns out there is more of that stuff than the stuff our physical senses can detect.
So what is prayer?
It is simply responding to an invitation to communicate with someone beyond my physical senses who does exist just like other things I cannot see also exist.
But prayer isn’t connecting with vibrations. It isn’t to put me in a peaceful state or to unlock secret universal powers or principles.
It is to communicate with an intelligent person who I can get to know because he has revealed himself, not just to me, but to anyone who will seek him.
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”
And he said to them, “When you pray, say:
“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.”
And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’?
I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.
And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”