My problems with prayer

I used to pray a lot without understanding why I did it. I would start to pray for something big, but then I would worry that I’d begin to doubt that either God couldn’t or didn’t want to perform a miracle for me should that big request not be fulfilled. Instead I prayed for small things that were likely to happen, because when they did I could then feel that I was definitely heard and the prayer was answered with a positive response. I would make sure to finish most of my prayers with the boilerplate “not my will, but yours” type of phrase to cover the moments where I inadvertently made too “big” a request and something different than what I hoped ended up happening. I assumed my behavior was related to cynical, insecure thoughts bubbling from an undercurrent of limited faith, so I strove to find ways to better understand prayer. As I questioned myself and others, the answers I heard compelled me to suspect that many Christians — perhaps the majority — regularly prayed without knowing why they did it, too. I wanted to know the truth, so I began asking myself and others questions.

Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

John 8:31–32 (NET) — NET Bible

Note: I am framing this through the worldview in which I was raised — a version of Protestant fundamentalist Evangelical Armenian Christianity¹ — so some of these definitions, viewpoints, and perhaps even conclusions may not match all views of Christianity.

Our world is effectively perfect

O Lord, you are great, mighty, majestic, magnificent, glorious, and sovereign over all the sky and earth! You, Lord, have dominion and exalt yourself as the ruler of all. You are the source of wealth and honor; you rule over all. You possess strength and might to magnify and give strength to all.

1 Chronicles 29:11–12 (NET) — NET Bible

Christians believe that God is sovereign, either by complete, direct, and constant control over events, or by more indirect and light influence over people and moments in time. Prayer is seen as a way to change the world for the better and God is expected to have the power to perform those changes. The future is a largely undetermined and malleable material for prayer to have an impact in forming. This makes the future exciting, because basically with the power of miracles just about anything could happen. If a Christian has a want or a need, then they are instructed to ask God for it and then patiently and faithfully wait for a change in the world that correlates to the request made in the prayer. If the event prayed for occurs, then the prayer was answered with an affirmative. If the event does not occur post-prayer, there are actually two possible realities one must face:

1. the request is going to be granted at some time in the future and one must wait for the moment to occur, or
2. the event will never happen and the waiting will be fruitless.

The issue with this worldview was not obvious to me at the start, but I began to realize the implications this view could have for humanity’s past and present. If prayer is intended to be used to change current and future events, then the same would be true of all previous prayer requests from Christians. If a Christian believes that God knows what is best, never makes mistakes, is never surprised, and is in control, then how would any prayer ever made be anything but perfectly answered? Every “no” was supposed to be that way and the events that occurred as a result were always meant to have occurred precisely as they unfolded.

Consider the following hypothetical: one person prays for a dry day to keep a wedding photogenic and a farmer two miles away prays for rain to grow her crops. If the wedding goes well but the crops die, how should the farmer interpret this response to prayer? What if the difference in the level of impact the prayer would have on the person requesting was greater than crops, such as an employee praying to receive a raise at work tomorrow and at the same time another worker a country over is begging God to provide an escape from the forced slave labor under which he has been suffering for the past five years? If the raise is granted but the slave remains imprisoned, what should the slave expect for his future?

The average Christian seems to consider only the current prayer in the current situation within the present time and the future, but I believe ignoring the global scope and historical elements of prayer does a disservice to one’s worldview about prayer. If the answer to a prayer is “no”, then it is expected of the Christian to believe that the “no” is better than a “yes” in the situation. This all seems acceptable when the request was “may I go to Disneyland this year” but seems far less understandable when the prayer request is “may I please escape my abusive spouse”. However, if the worldview is to remain consistent, then every person suffering today is in a better place than if they were to not be suffering. If prayer is always answered properly, then every time a “no” or silence is the response, then this is a good thing and should be questioned, doubted, or worried over.

Because every answer from a perfect all-powerful God is perfectly answered, I believe the only conclusion we can come to is that we are living in the perfect timeline. We are not becoming more corrupt, secular, narcissistic, distracted, or materialistic; we are becoming what God wants us to be either through prayer or direct miraculous/theistic action. We are living in the timeline that God made for his maximal glory. To believe anything different is to believe that an omniscient God lacks the ability or willingness to answer good prayers from Christians or is constrained by the lack of prayers for particular moments in time. Neither cast an all-powerful all-loving God in good light.

I think this line of thought could lead someone to then ask, “Why are we praying, anyway?” What is the purpose of prayer if everything that happens only occurs because God wants it?² Why are we mournful about the current state of the world if we also believe that prayer can produce change? If change was supposed to occur, wouldn’t it be occurring right now? Surely if “faith the size of a mustard seed” can move mountains and yet no mountains are moving, then that’s more of an indication that the mountains are not to be moved and less that there is little to no faith left in the world!

What then could one infer about prayer if there was an abundance of faith and yet nothing resulted from it?

An unknown amount of faith is always required

And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

John 14:13–14 (NET) — NET Bible

Perhaps Christians who were raised in other denominations can make different claims, but I was raised with the worldview that my life was the product of my choices freely made by myself and others, but if I willingly submitted my ability to make choices to God’s fate, I was also capable of being guided or perhaps completely controlled by God and others around me could be made to bend to my prayer-based God-approved needs or goals. The implications of this potential power could be the manipulation of the will of others or the editing of space, time, or matter to fulfill the requests of my prayer.

I can remember vividly an example of this worldview being supported in my life. A local church drove a truck down the residential streets of its nearby neighborhoods to announce the upcoming VBS the church would be offering to the community, and my little sister wanted to be able to see it and catch the candy the volunteers tossed from the truck bed. All the children in the family went looking for the truck on the main drive of our townhouse development, but we couldn’t track it down. We heard it seemingly driving away and assumed that we must have missed it, so we returned home in disappointment for a slightly-delayed lunch. During the prayer for the meal my sister asked for the truck to drive by the house. We were shocked that she would ask for something like that and began attempting to console her for her eventual disappointment. We were all surprised when we heard the truck driving by our front door and rushed out to discover that it had returned (or perhaps never left and simply drove to our street).

For years after I credited this event as an example of simple faith empowering a prayer. I felt regularly ashamed of lacking the faith to believe that God could fulfill such a request and how immediately I was working to explain the unlikely possibility of the prayer being fulfilled. Once when I retold this story to my Bible study group I wept out of shame for my unbelief.

I look now at the events and marvel at my distorted view of reality. Though I’m sure I wouldn’t admit to it fully, I can see now my superstition that there was an amount of faith required for prayer to be heard by God. I know that I believed that prayer would potentially be heard better or more frequently with both good faith and through collective power: the more people praying and the more those people had faith that things could happen, the more likely then that God would answer (say “yes” to the request of) that prayer. For some reason I never considered the moral ramifications of a God who was too sleepy or careless to hear any prayer under a particular power level. Why or how would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving God require any faith at all or any particular number of people praying to listen to a prayer? What kind of a good God would have to be chided to be loving?

Have faith but maintain a level of doubt

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (emphasis mine)

2 Corinthians 12:7–9 (NET) — NET Bible

The perception I get of a Christian begging God relentlessly for something is akin to a child berating a parent until the parent relents to the request, usually with a burst of impatience and frustration at the child’s incessant nagging. Is that the picture most Christians have of God?³ Does God need to be harassed to listen to a good prayer from a loyal and virtuous Christian? If God is actually more patient and more loving than an average parent, then why are Christians encouraged to ask a prayer more than once?

If God upon hearing a prayer can choose multiple options as an answer, then it seems likely that a similar decision occurred in the past and will likely occur with each new prayer. Most Christians I know only consider the positive moments of prayer in their past when they consider the likelihood of another answered prayer in the present, purposely ignoring the multiple unanswered prayers in the past. Instead of ignoring the past, I want to fully consider its implications for the present and future.

I don’t know of many Christians who believe that God is prevented from taking action in the world until a particular prayer is given about it; rather, there is a bit of hand-waving that God is both completely capable of doing anything without permission but chooses to hold back from making changes in some areas until being requested. Therefore, if something good happens without anyone seeming to have prayed for it, then the change happened because God chose it to be; however, if someone prays for something and then that change occurs, then it was due to prayer that the change took place.

If all this is true — that God can make changes at will and also sometimes chooses to wait for a prayer before making changes — then I believe that it is arguable that everything in human history is the product of a God who found all those moments acceptable. Every dark moment in human history is because God wanted it to be and every recorded bit of suffering is because God considered it the best route for humanity. Any prayer that is being lifted at present has to then be considered in light of a world that is full of misery and is under the control of a God who believes that all of it is okay; after all, if it was not acceptable misery, then God would have made changes or encouraged prayer to be given to grant the possibility of change.

If my previous statements are not true and God can only make changes some of the time, then God is either not powerful or is purposely holding back grace to only a select few people. If God is not powerful, then prayer seems pointless; but if God is powerful but hesitant or unwilling to intervene, then love is not as pure as Christians believe because God is love and yet God won’t stop suffering.

The darkest possible consideration one might have is that God is not loving and wants the misery to happen and finds a twisted sense of joy in the pain of humanity’s past and praying to this God is a foolish endeavor.

How does this get considered in light of the present prayer? If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then prayer seems pointless for change because any change that can occur will occur through God’s will and not mankind’s. If God wants people to pray and will not answer until either a faith or number level is met then that God is a petty and tiresome God. The final possibility is again that God is evil and praying to that God is potentially dangerous if that God is evil but not omniscient.

If praying to God is akin to praying to a sock puppet in terms of the certainty of having any prayer answered, then what’s the point of prayer? There is no true conversation happening because there is such uncertainty about the answer to prayer: there is no voice being spoken that can be heard by others; there is no verifiable connection to the request and prayer; there is no way of repeating a prayer and seeing it happen again; there is no standard way of prayer that can be repeated and tested.

And what of the moments when someone is certain that God “told them” to do or say something to someone else that cannot verify the validity of the prayer? Such a moment has happened to me once or twice in my life and it is extremely awkward to confront a person who makes such a claim without in some way implying that the person is hearing, believing, or thinking things that aren’t true while also not being able to discern that the conclusions drawn from that prayer are false.

Conclusion

“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray while standing in synagogues and on street corners so that people can see them. Truly I say to you, they have their reward! But whenever you pray, go into your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. When you pray, do not babble repetitiously like the Gentiles, because they think that by their many words they will be heard. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matthew 6:5–8 (NET) — NET Bible

I have seen prayer used in so many immoral ways that I certainly wondered if I really knew what the right way was. I heard many people use the term “prayer warrior” for those Christians who seemed to pray for something to happen and for that event to occur and I always wondered how that didn’t make that Christian some form of human genie or fortune teller. Why did prayer seem to come naturally to those who were generally better with public speaking, and why would so many Christians tend to rate the quality of the prayer based on how close to a sermon it seemed? Why was having a conversation with someone’s closest friend and creator so muddled and uncertain, when the quality of a friendship was generally graded on its ease?

The Christian Bible depicts God in the Old Testament as walking with Adam and Eve, having long conversations with Moses, chiding prophets like Jonah. The Christian Bible in the New Testament has stories of an incarnation of that same deity walking, talking, eating, sleeping, and generally acting completely like a human in the four canon gospels, and then later speaking and displaying glory to Paul. Christians since have been only given prayer as their method of communicating with God?⁴ Surely that isn’t enough for most.

Footnotes