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.

Loss is excruciating.

Loss of life, loss of love, loss of job, loss of dreams.

Loss doubles us over, knocks us down, and sits on our hearts.

It follows us into every corner of our lives, every crevice of our hearts, never-ceasing, never resting.

It’s not something that you fight. there’s no winning such a battle.

It’s something that is thrown at you with such force that you have no choice but to catch it.

A lot of people that I love very much are struggling with loss right now. And so, I too, am struggling as I mourn for them and with them. There are no magic words to heal or comfort,  no wand to wave it all away.

 I do believe there is something important for all of us in the midst of loss,  gifts of sorts that we can grab ahold of. We cannot always bear to look for them right away as we are trying so hard to just survive. But as the raw baby skin on our hearts begins to flesh over, we start to see the little gifts we received along the way.

Last night I lay in bed, surrounded by my bible, my journal, and two devotional books. I was looking for comfort, for answers, for peace. I cam across this quote, chicken scratched onto a tiny piece of paper, and pressed into the the pages of Job:

“Knowing that God suffers with us doesn’t make our pain disappear or explain the enigma of suffering, but it does enable us to keep trusting God and believing in His goodness, even in the midst of the inexplicable. We may not be able to trace God’s hand in what has happened, but we can still trust God’s heart. And trusting God’s heart encourages us to turn toward Him, instead of away from Him, to turn toward the cross and the road we must travel to get there.”

{Stephen Seamands in 

Wounds that Heal

}

I often feel abandoned by God in seasons of pain and loss. When I see others walk through it, I am angry at God for abandoning them. I forget over and over again that He is near us always and that nothing can separate us from His love. How quick I am to doubt His goodness, His sovereignty. I forget that He lived a life of alienation, carried His own cross, gasped for breath mounted to its splintering wood, wore a crown of thorns dripping with His own blood, drank vinegar from a nasty sponge. He suffered big time, more than the Bible could even describe.

He gets it.

So I sit here cross-legged on the rug, contemplating loss and the pain that it brings, I am humbled once again by how much I try to understand and how little I actually need to understand.

Though we may suffer, He is present. Though He may feel so far away, He is near.

I read a status on Facebook the other day, that read something like this: “You know it’s the end times, when gay marriage becomes legal in the U.S.”

When I was home last week my sweet Mama made some good old fashioned salmon cakes. Her mom made them for her as a kid and so she has made them for us. All you need is a can of salmon, an egg or 2, and a bowl of bread crumbs. For less than 50 cents per person, everyone is fed.

Now that I am an adult of sorts, I am noticing more about the world around me. So, when I bit into my crispy salmon cake I took notice (for the first time) of the tiny little bones underneath the flaky crust. I announced my discovery to the rest of my family. “Oh yeah, they’re edible,” my mom said offhandedly, and went back to her conversation with my sister.

They didn’t taste like bones, they didn’t even really crunch like bones, but I knew that they were bones. I’ve always had a weird thing with food consistency, especially in any kind of meat, and thus I was extremely perturbed by my discovery. Thankfully those little cakes are so good that the idea not to eat them at all barely crossed my mind. But it could of. I could’ve chosen not to eat that scrumptious salmon cake because of the no big deal, easily digestible bones inside.

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder If I am living to avoid the little bones in my salmon cake? Am I freaking out about the small things; picking them out of my life although they are barely visible? Am I more worried about the bones than I am about enjoying the meat around them?

I have found that sometimes those “meaty” moments are the most painful.  I have learned more when I feel as if my entire soul is about to break than I do when I feel whole.

There are so many little bones in our lives. So many moments that we let define us that have no business doing so. Are we living out of those moments? Or are we living out of the ones with substance, the ones that will fill our bellies and not just our mouths. The ones that will carry us forward, not stop us in our tracks.

As my alarm screeched at me to awaken this morning, I couldn’t help but feel like Cinderella talking back to the old clock as its chime tells her once again where she must be;

“Oh that clock! Old killjoy. I hear you. Come on, get up, you say, Time to start another day. Even he orders me around.”

 My senior year of college, I spent the month of January in Costa Rica. The day before I left, I made sure to tuck my wristwatch securely into my suitcase, ready to keep me on time and in control. That watched stayed firmly strapped to my left wrist from the time we took off out of Newark airport, to the time we landed, a month later, in Newark airport. With every intention of checking it at all times while out of the country, I had almost forgotten I was wearing it.

San Jose is the capital of Costa Rica; a bustling little city, vibrant with color and culture. Our drive from the airport to our accommodations left me feeling right at home as the traffic was horrendous. Honking and cursing, quick right turns, and nascar-type left turns. “Everyone’s is in a rush here”,  I thought, “where is the cultural difference?”

The next morning our bus driver showed up 45 minutes late. He was a jovial man in his early 50’s, a smile that could have lit the sun. He pulled his faded teal bus up the driveway, put it in park, and hopped out. We waited for him to recognize his lateness, apologize for it even, after all, we were late for our very first outing in this beautiful new place. But he didn’t say a word about it. He shook our hands, kindly helped the girls onto the bus and off we went. And wouldn’t you know, the tour guide that we were arrived late for, had nothing to say about it either.

That is the culture. Time matters very little, as long as you are doing what is most important in that moment. Right on time or two hours later, it’s all the same to them. 

But how can we throw time to the wind when being late could cost us our jobs, our important appointments, even our relationships? If I detach myself from a clock for too long I start to miss things that I can’t afford to miss.

And so I have started setting alarms. Sitting in bed with a book between work and bible study? Set an alarm. That way I don’t have to constantly be checking the time and can read blissfully knowing that my alarm will let me know when It’s time to move on to something else. 

If this advice seems exactly like what Cinderella is ranting against in the quote I shared earlier, that’s because it is exactly like what she is ranting about. But I have found, that this is a million times better than frantically checking the clock every two seconds.

Must you always be a slave to the chime?! NO! 

On days where you have nothing pressing to be done, throw all clocks under the bed and follow no schedule. Vacations are perfect for this type of thing, but also snow days, sick days, or even personal days. Allow yourself the space to completely unplug from time and task, to just sit in the moment.