Have you ever prayed for something you wanted and then you waited and waited but ended up not getting what you asked for?
Me too! That feels disappointing. Sometimes it makes me wonder if I’m praying correctly, or if God is listening. And when it happens a lot—when I don’t get what I pray for—then I start to wonder if there’s any reason to pray.
Maybe I even stop praying for a while. Talking with an invisible God who doesn’t talk back can seem like a waste of time when there are other things to do—things like playing outside, spending time with friends, or doing homework.
It’s OK to feel this way. God knows this world is so exciting that we would rather be rolling down hills than praying at an altar—God made it that way, after all!
One thing to do when you start to feel like prayer is a waste of time is to think about what prayer is. Prayer doesn’t have to happen at certain times in certain places, like around the dinner table or in bed before we go to sleep. we can pray anywhere—in church, at home, in a museum, on the baseball field, or at the beach. We can pray whenever and wherever we want to.
Prayer also doesn’t depend on our heads being bowed and our hands being folded and our eyes being closed. We can, of course, pray with our eyes closed, but we can also pray while laughing at jokes and licking an ice cream cone!
Let’s put it this way: Prayer is simply taking time to remember that God loves us, that God is loving us right now, and that God will always, always love us in the future. (Yes, including after we die. God’s love outlives our death.) And that can happen anywhere. In fact, it’s sometimes easier to remember this when we are in the middle of spending time with people we love and who love us or when enjoying the rest of God’s creation—like by spending time outside—than it is during some of the “typical” and expected times to pray.
Prayer is grounded in God’s love for us. Everything about our life is a gift from God. And even though God has already given us so many gifts, it’s OK to ask God for more. This is often what we do when we pray: You might ask God for a special toy that you saw at the store, to help you get a good grade on a test, or to make it snow while you sleep so that school will be canceled. If you’re an adult, maybe you ask for an easy commute to work without traffic, or for the snowstorm to pass you by so you don’t need to plow the driveway.
These are exactly the kinds of prayers God wants us to pray. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells people, “Ask and it shall be given to you” (7:7). In other words, Jesus says, ask God for what you want, because God likes giving us what we want. He compares God to a parent. “Don’t parents like giving their kids good gifts and making sure they are taken care of?” he asks. “Well, God likes doing that, too.” God, like a very good parent, wants us to be happy and to have what we want. But God also wants to help us want what’s really good for us.
That doesn’t mean God wants us to stop asking for everything that we want. Sometimes we think God only wants us to pray the way the pope or a nun does: for world peace, to end hunger, etc. Sometimes we think prayer only “counts” when we pray for noble things.
But, as Father Herbert McCabe said, the only thing God wants from us is our honesty: “When you pray you must come before God as honestly as you can. There is no point in pretending to be him. One of the great human values of prayer is that you face the facts about yourself and admit to what you want; and you know you can talk about this to God because he is totally loving and accepting.”
Once we are honest about our wants, then God can help us to want better things or different things. But the first step is being honest about what we want right now. God already knows anyway, so it’s not like we’re telling God a big secret.
But what about when our prayers aren’t selfish? Like when we are praying for our friends’ grandma to heal from cancer or for our dog to get better after being hit by a car? It makes sense that God might not give us the newest video game, but why wouldn’t God answer our prayers and heal somebody who needs it?
Prayer isn’t a magic wand that we get to wave when we want to get our way (even when what we want is a really good thing!). God created the world to work in certain sorts of ways. For example, if you hold up a pencil and drop it, it will fall to the floor. That’s because of a force called gravity, which pulls objects toward the center of the earth. This happens so regularly that we are able to predict that whenever we let go of an object, it will very likely fall to the floor. Scientists call this a “law” — a statement about how we should expect our world to work. What kinds of things do we expect to happen in our world? Well, first of all, we should expect fun things! We should expect to be loved, and we should expect that our dog will greet us when we come home, and we should expect that if we jump in a pond then we will get wet.
But we should also expect sad things to happen: sometimes our pets will die and sometimes our family members will get very sick and sometimes giant storms will destroy entire towns. When this happens, we pray to God to help the people suffering, and then we do what we can to help those people. In fact, maybe we are God’s answer to some of the world’s prayers: People pray for God to help them and God sends us to help them.
Still, sometimes we can’t help. Sometimes people get sick and die, and sometimes people have to use a wheelchair, and sometimes war breaks out right in somebody’s backyard.
Even then, we keep right on praying. Why? Because even when bad things happen, God is still with us. One of the worst things that can happen to somebody we love is that they might die. And we know from the stories of Easter that God’s love is stronger than death. God is capable—and this is a mystery!—of carrying us from this life to another life, a life that we might call “God’s life.” When we pray, we remind ourselves that death and sadness do not get the final word on life. God does.
So does prayer work? Yes, prayer does what it’s meant to do: It reminds us that God loves us and will always love us, and it helps us to feel closer with God.
But will our prayers convince God to work miracles? I sure hope so! But maybe we can expand our idea of what miracles are. There are different kinds of miracles, aren’t there? We could say that the entire world is one giant miracle. Rainbows and lakes and wild horses remind us just how miraculously creative God is. There’s no reason to think that a God who is this creative won’t ever surprise us again.
Sadly, most of the time we tend to overlook these surprises. Sometimes we focus so intently on one prayer request that we overlook the millions of other blessings God is giving us. When we train our eyes to see every good gift as a surprise from God, then we might approach prayer differently. Not as an opportunity to ask God for one or two things, but as an opportunity to remember all the good things in our life that God has already given us.
And if, while we pray, we remember some of the bad things in our lives, it’s OK to pray for God to fix those. It’s OK to pray for God to give us miracles. But what’s most important is to remember that God is with us even while we are waiting for our miracles.
This essay is part of the new column Childish by Brandon Ambrosino, which aims to bring kids into theological conversations. You can read more of Brandon’s columns here.
Image: Unsplash/Ben White
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