(Un)Answered Prayers

 January 27, 2021

Intercessory prayer is hard work! Just briefly mentioning the names on my prayer list can take me a half hour or more. Prayers with any measure of detail can consume an entire morning, and if I don’t have my list in front of me, I forget a lot of the people and situations I promised myself I would remember. But it’s not the sheer volume of prayers that makes it so much work; it’s also the frequent absence of seeing concrete and significant answers. I can’t even begin to number the prayers that seemingly have gone unanswered. 

But what if instead of being proactive, many of my prayers are simply protective or helping maintain a status quo? More than once I’ve been involved in situations that were troubled for some time before exploding in very messy ways. In reflecting upon these, one of the common denominators is my failure to persevere in prayer. A marriage was troubled. The couple came in for counseling. We prayed. I prayed...for a time. Things seemed to be going well enough, until one filed for divorce, and I was convicted yesterday the Lord of slacking off in my prayers. It seemed that the couple had reconciled, so I stopped praying. In reality, they were still struggling behind the scenes, and needed those prayers to maintain equilibrium. 

Sometimes answered prayer doesn’t come in the form of dramatic divine intervention; it may be in the quiet and desperate struggle that no one sees, but which needs the strength those seemingly unanswered prayers have been providing. We who pray must decide whether prayer actually does any good, or not; whether there is a spiritual dimension to life that is impacted by our prayers, or not. If not, then we might as well quit praying altogether, but if God really exists, and if he listens to our prayers, then my prayers can, and do, make a difference. Quitting early is an admission that we don’t really believe there is a loving Heavenly Father who hears and answers. Sometimes the mere maintenance of the status quo is more of an answer than we can imagine.