The Problem With Prayer
You already 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.
A while back I wrote the following:
What if the entire outcome of our lives is based on prayer?
Not just the idea that it would be a good idea to cover ourselves by praying, but that praying is the central key element for a successful life?
What if prayer is more important than having intense desire, expending herculean efforts, planning with extreme detail and precision, or fostering and developing the right connections?
What if there is no such thing as luck? — but that what appears to the outside viewer as a lucky break is the working of an invisible hand?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not discounting any of these other important activities that take up so much of our time and energy.
But what if they are much less important than we and others believe, compared with something so hazy or unmanageable as prayer?
It makes sense that when it comes to our lives linked with God it is described by Jesus as new birth or being born again. In fact I believe the whole thing began with a prayer not our own. God prayed for us first. We then were called to respond. When we did the new link was forged and is present even now, regardless how much or little we have used it.
And just like babies over time learn the language of their parents, we can learn the language of our Heavenly Father. And once we learn the language principles of prayer and begin to seriously and methodically use it to communicate, our lives begin to change in the deepest of ways, from the inside out.
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.
Matthew 7:7-8 (ESV)
