How Do You Pray?

If the Lord is willing...

How do you pray?

I've often seen this first meme about prayer going around in ex-Christian circles, in circles of people who feel that God or the church let them down. While it's certainly true that the church or fellow Christians may have let you down, I think it's wrong to put that blame on God. I think rather, people often approach prayer, and God, like writing a Christmas gift list to Santa: 'God, give me this relationship, this job, this money, this opportunity, this accolade, this thing.'

Furthermore, we treat the prayer like a test of God: 'IF YOU'RE REAL you'll give me this...'

It also puts us in the place of God, thinking (falsely) that we know what is best for us, that we know everything - even the future and the unknown, that we know the makings of the universe and that this one thing we are asking for is in our best interest IF God loves us. IF God is as smart and all-knowing as us.

If you still pray this way, you will find yourself let down. You will find that you are not God. You will be despondent when God says No.

Many times in my short walk with God I have been told No. Praying for a relationship or a job or an outcome or a health situation. Some of those times the No has made me angry at God. Unable to understand the answer, because I wasn't praying the right way. I wasn't allowing for the chance that God loves me and wants what's best for me and might know things, like the future, like the unknown, that I have no way of knowing or even imagining. I'm stuck in the present.

Sometimes God tells us No, because as my Pastor Bradley J. Helgerson says, there is a forest of Yes on the other side of that one No. If we can only accept it and our own limitations as human beings - our limitations to see all things, know all things.

Let me give you a real life example. Before I met my husband I briefly dated a man who I immediately thought must have been sent by God. I was new to faith, new to trying to LIVE my beliefs, new to trying to let go and let God direct me to what is best for me. I thought (correctly) that my life up until that moment had shown me that I don't always know what is best for me. That I too often gave in to the human temptation to try to control all things, even things that are outside of our control. I was new to trying to abstain from sex until marriage. I was new to dating Christian men. And I met a man - a good man - who checked off all of the boxes I thought God must want for me. Who also believed in abstaining from sex before marriage. Who also was a repentant sinner, come to Christ the long way through thoughtful contemplation. That was enough for me - I thought - this is God's will - this must be it! Imagine my disappointment when he got a new job and moved far out of state after our first date (yes, I thought all of THAT after one date! LOLOLOL). I was angry at God, truth be told. I went jogging to burn off the anger many times, furious that God would give me a glimpse of a righteous man and then whisk him away. I was still trying to control all things. I was still playing God. Not understanding. Not understanding the No. Not simply accepting the No with the faith that God knew what was best.

What God could see, and I couldn't, was the beautiful gift - the blessing - he had in store for me with a man I had yet to even meet. Someone I couldn't even imagine. Someone he had been working on and sculpting and keeping his eye on, the same way he'd been working on me and sculpting me and keeping his eye on me even through my raging and my turning away from God for decades. I was one of those who God had had to put his hook in my nose and his bit in my mouth, to turn me back on the path, back towards him. And here - unknown to me then - was someone else, a Yes, a strong, wise, repentant sinner who God was working on and turning back on the path. Someone I was yet to meet.

"Because you rage against me and because your insolence has reached my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will make you return by the way you came." Isaiah 37:29

If God had answered my 'Santa list prayer' - if God had said Yes to everything I thought I knew was best for me - I might never have met my husband, a most beautiful Yes in a forest of Yesses, just on the other side of that No.

When I pray now, and for some time, I try to pray like the instruction in James, below. I try to pray - "if it's your will. And if it's not your will, please grant me the understanding someday of why it wasn't. And please grant me acceptance and peace if that understanding never comes."

"Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit.” You do not even know what will happen tomorrow! What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your proud intentions. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do, yet fails to do it, is guilty of sin." James 4:13-16

And so far, since changing the way I pray, I have only ever received Yeses, even if they first appear as a No.

I edited the meme. This second version is more accurate. Love, Keri