Is God Still Good When Our Prayers Aren’t Answered?

The other day I was driving home from work with the radio on lightly in the background. After managing a bunch of preschoolers all day, I was exhausted and dazed as I followed the familiar roads home. The host came on after the ending of a current hit, ready to share a listener’s story of God’s grace and love.

This listener was overwhelmed by God’s grace and love, the host read, when after years of prayer, her sister was cancer free. “Amen”, the host said over and over, then went on to reiterate God’s goodness, his faithfulness.

As tired as I was, my head and my heart were now quite awake. What would that email have sounded like if, after years and years of prayer, her sister had passed away due to her cancer? Would she still have been overwhelmed by God’s grace and love? Would God still be as good? As faithful?

This questioning was in no way a judgement of this woman and her joy. It was a question of whether or not prayer really changes things. Can we put that much weight on prayer? Does answered or unanswered prayers somehow prove God is listening? Do we need obviously “answered prayers” in order to believe that God is good even in the midst of this fallen world?

I have always struggled with the idea of prayer. As a little kid I got the message somehow that if I just asked God for something, I would receive it. This set me up for many years of feeling disappointment in God; questioning His goodness.

So what If we pray for something fervently, without ceasing, and God doesn’t “answer our prayer”? What do we do with that?

First, I think we need to look at what prayer is. Is it kneeling by the bed as a child in a blue flowered nightgown? Is it face down on the bathroom linoleum, blinded by tears? Is it a rambling car conversation with the Almighty on the commute home? Is it a simple “thank you” when you walk away from an accident unscathed? Yes. It is all of these and then some.

Prayer is communication with God. It is a gift from our Savior who wants to have a relationship with us. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” {Matthew 11:28}. “Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise Him” {Psalm 33:1}.

Sometimes my prayer is a mantra that I repeat over and over on a day riddled with anxiety. Sometimes it’s silence while watching the Master’s masterpiece of a sunset over my house. Sometimes it’s a call to action, a desperate plea for God to answer my request. Only sometimes are those call to action prayers “answered” in the way I would have liked them to be answered.

Maybe I am too busy waiting for my specific answer, that I am missing His divine and perfect answer.

 I also think we need to re-define what it means to have a prayer “answered’. For many years I took the “ask and you shall receive” approach to prayer. I ask and God grants my request, much like a genie. However, when I felt as if I wasn’t receiving what I asked for (which was most of the time) I became angry and discouraged.

As a teenager, I prayed, almost exclusively, for freedom from debilitating anxiety. I was suffering greatly, and prayed until I was blue in the face, that God would take it away. I searched the Bible for answers, empathizing with Job, which fueled my anger at what I perceived to be God’s silence.

As I have continued on this journey to peace in the midst of anxiety, my unanswered teenage prayers have become much more clear. While I was praying for my pain to disappear, God was using my pain to strengthen my faith, my empathy, my love, my character. He had bigger plans than my own. Answering my prayer would been incredibly debilitating in my journey to the heart of Christ.

God knows what he is doing. He really really does.

I will leave you with this devotional from Oswald Chambers:

My Utmost for His Highest

Prayer is not a normal part of the life of the natural man. We hear it said that a person’s life will suffer if he doesn’t pray, but I question that. What will suffer is the life of the Son of God in him, which is nourished not by food, but by prayer. When a person is born again from above, the life of the Son of God is born in him, and he can either starve or nourish that life. Prayer is the way that the life of God in us is nourished. Our common ideas regarding prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.

“Ask, and you will receive…” John 16:24

We complain before God, and sometimes we are apologetic or indifferent to Him, but we actually ask Him for very few things. Yet a child exhibits a magnificent boldness to ask! Our Lord said, “…unless you…become as little children…” Matthew 18:3

Ask and God will do. Give Jesus Christ the opportunity and the room to work. The problem is that no one will ever do this until he is at his wits’ end. When a person is at his wits’ end, it no longer seems to be a cowardly thing to pray; in fact, it is the only way he can get in touch with the truth and the reality of God Himself. Be yourself before God and present Him with your problems— the very things that have brought you to your wits’ end. But as long as you think you are self-sufficient, you do not need to ask God for anything.

To say that “prayer changes things” is not as close to the truth as saying, “Prayer changes me and then I change things.” God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things. Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of working miracles in a person’s inner nature.