PRAYING DOESN’T SEEM LIKE ENOUGH

Hey Christians, have you ever faced a situation when you’ve wondered whether praying really is enough?

Not you, atheists; we know what you think. Although if you were plummeting through the sky on a plane with no working engines, I wonder if you’d give prayer a shot. Anyway, that aside, this thought’s for people who pray more often, and (if I can put it like this) actually write an address on the envelope and give it a stamp.

Anyway. Back to prayer feeling insufficient. I mean there are situations when people message you and ask you to pray and you can’t help feeling that closing your eyes and speaking to God about it is more of a platitude than a situation-changing prayer. That’s how I feel about my friend who has cancer and is fighting tonight in hospital. I can pray for a minute, maybe two, say ‘amen’ and then go back to my Christmas wrapping and hope that God does something. I can even message back with the praying emoji.

To be honest though, what I want to do, what I really want to do, is thunder on heaven’s gate until my fists bleed, wake up Saint Peter, and burst right into the throne room of God demanding to stay until he does… something, anything, to heal my friend.

Now, I reckon some of you will find that a disrespectful thing to say, and some of you will say that that’s exactly what prayer is. I don’t know who’s right, only that I don’t care about disrespect, any more than those friends who lowered the sick man through the roof. And I’m afraid that if the second group are right then I just don’t know how to do that in quite the way they mean.

I keep returning to the idea that whatever I mutter with my eyes closed and my head bowed, God hears my heart. I hope so. I hope he hears it through the night too, and I hope he knows the voice of a petition of people each lifting tear-stained faces to him on behalf of my friend.