When it would come time for prayer in the worship service, my mother would silently remind my brother and me to bow our heads, fold our hands, and close our eyes to observe the time. Neither my brother nor I were particularly enamored by this time. I would press my folded hands into my eyes and watch the "firework display" until my eyeballs hurt; my brother crawled under the pew to color with crayons the boots of the fellow in front of us. I can remember the pastor droning on from the pulpit; I remember wondering how someone who was so funny and interesting at Vacation Bible School could be so dang boring when he started the Prayer of the People.
I'm sure many of you have similar stories about dozing off or checking your text messages during the long prayers in worship. And right now, my social media is full of people commanding me to pray for something or criticizing politicians for their tweets for prayers. Prayer has been on my mind lately, so I thought I would blog about some of the misconceptions about prayers and some of the ways that I have grown to understand prayer as an important piece of my spiritual journey. Here 8 myths about prayer and some reflection on why these are wrong.
#8: Praying for things is a form of therapy to make us feel better.
Throughout my life, when things have gotten difficult, prayer has sometimes been helpful to calm my anxieties and give me a sense of peace about a particular issue. There is certainly truth to that. But this understanding of prayer can be misleading and taken to an extreme.
Ultimately, prayer is not about us. Churches have taught us to kneel, bow our heads, fold our hands, and close our eyes, not [only] because it keeps wiggly kids from wandering off, but because it is a reminder to us as adults that we come before God as beggars, as those in need of God's mercy. Ultimately, prayer is a form of worship and praise of God. It is about giving God glory and honor, not about our personal agenda. We don't bring our requests to God so that God will give us what we want; we bring our requests to God because we recognize that we can't control what is happening and we need to hand over our cares to God, who is in control.
When Jesus teaches about prayer in Matthew 6, he shows us that this humility is important. He tells us to go inside to pray, rather than flaunting our fancy prayers and bragging about our abilities in the streets. His prayer begins by giving honor and glory to God the Father (hallowed by Thy name); it continues with Your Will be done, not my will, not what I hope is going to happen, but Yours. Period. No matter what. While praying might produce a sense of calm (Philippians 4), that's not the reason or motivation for prayer.
#7: If we don't say it, God doesn't hear it.
Once there was some questionable ice coming down as students were leaving school. As I drove home, it briefly fluttered to my mind to worry about school letting out at this time, but I didn't give it a second thought until much later. I went home to put my thick wool socks on and cuddle up under a warm blanket, and it wasn't until after dinner that I looked at my phone to see that I had a message from a parent asking me to pray for the youth who were driving home. Of course this was 3 or 4 hours ago, but I wanted to affirm this prayer. Of course, I hadn't actually prayed out loud, except a prayer after the fact of thanks that the kids were home safely. I hadn't named those prayers; do they still count?
Scripture is pretty clear on this one: you don't need to have a list of names or a grammatically correct sentence or even to have verbalized the prayer at all. In Matthew 6, Jesus says,
...for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
And even more, Romans 8 tells us:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.
This feels sometimes like both a comfort and a curse. On one hand, when I've forgotten or run out of time or I didn't know what to pray for in the first place, I don't have to make myself feel terribly guilty because God knows before we ask. On the other hand, it means we aren't in control. It wasn't us that fixed it by naming it; it was God.
#6: More Prayers = More Results
"She needs all the prayers she can get." It's a phrase I've heard myself say because it expresses for us the desperation and the need for prayer; it's a wonderful way to invite others into prayer. And there is something spiritually wonderful when large groups of people come together in prayer for one thing. Powerful!
But I don't know of anywhere in scripture that says that if you pray more often or have hundreds of people praying for something, that God somehow hears it more. And if we worship a God who knows our hearts, who counts the hairs on our heads, and who cares for the sparrow, we have to know that God hears even our smallest whisper. And if we look back, we know that prayer isn't just about getting what we want or asking for our own personal will to be done, so "results" don't have a direct correlation with "answers."
#5: What does it mean when God "answers" prayer?
Before cars had bluetooth and before you could talk on speakerphone while driving, I would occasionally pray out loud while I was driving home from work. I would think to myself that the other drivers I was passing might think I was talking to myself. And I'd be lying if I didn't ever feel the creep of doubt and despair at the idea that I was talking to silence.
(^^ actual footage of me praying in my car...)
The idea that God "answers" prayer seems to assume that prayer is a question. But prayer does not have to be a question. It might be an expression of gratitude or thanks, a wail of mourning or a cry of pain; while we certainly ask for things like making the sick well or making our troubles go away, prayer is also the acknowledgement that Jesus shows us in Luke 22 when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Father if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done." Most of the time, it seems to me that the answered prayer we are looking for is something we can bank as proof that God exists. It seems like the question we are asking in prayer is, does God exist? Are you there, God?
Asking if God is there is a good question: it's a question that was asked by Moses at the burning bush and Paul on the road to Damascus. It's a question that helps us tell the difference between God's work and the work of something else. But perhaps it's unreasonable or even audacious to ask for God to prove to us that God exists by giving us what we want or performing some miracle for our benefit. When we are requesting things of God, we need to remember that our expected outcome comes from our limited human experience; God's response to these requests does not need to fit into our understanding. The fact that Aunt Susan didn't get well does not negate God's mercy and kindness; Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead but many others died and stayed dead. The fact that cousin Jimmy got a cancer diagnosis does not mean that God is punishing us; plenty of bad things happened to Jesus, including torture, betrayal and execution, but God was not punishing him.
Bottom line: when we pray, perhaps we need to redefine what it would mean for God to answer us...
#4: Prayers to you. Our prayers go out to you.
This is one of my personal pet peeves. It's fairly common even on a show like the Today's Show for a speaker to say, "Our thoughts and prayers go out to you," when a tragedy or disaster strikes. Even in my smaller circles who are praying for A's on tests and angry parents, I see folks saying, "Prayers to you." And sometimes people even ask for prayers or good vibes to be sent their way. And all I can think of is this ridiculous magical juju...
Don't get me wrong. I want people who are struggling to know that I am thinking about them, whether they are in grief or stress or just need to know someone else is out there. I also want people to know that I'm lifting them to Jesus in prayer so that they can derive comfort from that fact. But if we're sending our prayers to other people or we are praying TO them, well, that just ain't right. That's golden calf, idols, Baal worship kinda stuff. The Ten Commandments warn us against this, telling us not to have any God but The Lord.
It might seem like simple semantics, the kind of thing only pastors worry about, but I think it's important and here's why. When it's just another word for good vibes and thoughts and spirit fingers, prayer doesn't mean the same thing. It's a horizontal connection between me and you. That horizontal connection is good, but it's not the end of it. Prayer is when I take that horizontal connection and invite the vertical one, the one that connects both of us to God. When I think of prayers on behalf of others (intercessory prayer), I think of the story of the the paralytic in Mark chapter 2. The man is lying on his mat, and his friends carry him to Jesus. They can't get in the front door, so instead of leaving him or giving him only the comfort they could provide, the lift him up, dig a hole in the roof, and lower him into Jesus' presence.
Guys - intercessory prayer is so much more than sending our own thoughts and juju to our friends who are suffering. It is the acknowledgement, that what ails you, what makes you suffer, what brings you pain is beyond my capabilities to fix, so I lift you to the one who is able to abundantly more than what we could ever hope or imagine.
#3: Prayer is always intercessory, a wish list, a list of names.
When I was growing up, I had a Sunday School teacher who had written on a slip of paper in the front of her Bible the names of folks she prayed for every night. Then and now, I find this practice to be so movingly beautiful. I love and respect folks who have a spiritual gift of lifting folks to God in prayer. But for the longest time, I thought that this was all prayer was.
Scripture shows us, however, that prayer occurs in a wide variety of ways. We find prayers of praise in Exodus when the Israelites come out of the dessert, prayers of confession in 2 Samuel after David commits adultery, prayers for strength in Joshua, and prayers for help in Esther. We find Jeremiah angrily cursing God and Jesus wrestling with God's will in the Garden of Gethsemane. We find David dancing with all his might and widows mourning and wailing. We find Eli praying for God to show himself and Job praying to be left alone.
Prayer, it would seem, has a lot of room for variation. It doesn't need to look the same for everyone and at all times.
#2: Prayer is always talking
Sometimes I think of prayer like the movie Bruce Almighty.
Sometimes, especially in worship, we spend a lot of time doing the talking. We tell God what we need, what we want, how we feel, what we've done... We talk and we talk and we talk, and we consider prayers to be words and sentences that we create to give over to God.
But if, as we've mentioned before, prayer is really about saying "God's will be done," how can we discern God's will if we are constantly doing the talking? How can we hear what God is saying if we're talking over God's voice? Sometimes the best prayer is to be still and know that God is God, God is here, and God is at work.
#1: When crappy things happen, the only thing we need is prayer
After the massacre in Las Vegas, many of my friends on social media, many of whom are Christians, started posting some version of this:
or this...
or this...
In other words, prayers aren't enough. Gun legislation, mental health care, or some other form of action, in their minds, needed to happen. Prayers were simply words in the wind.
And this is true if we think of our prayers like we mentioned before, like juju vibes being sent in magical squiggly lines to one another. It's true if we're keeping this horizontal and only sending our prayers TO the victims. This is true if we rely on our government and legislators for our salvation and healing.
But it's simply not true if we believe that prayer is lifting one another and this situation up to God. If we believe that in praying for someone, we acknowledge that what we can do for them is immeasurably less than what God can do for them. If we acknowledge that this situation is beyond a simple fix of gun legislation and mental health care; this is beyond a simple answer. In fact, when I think of the tragedies, both natural disasters and acts of violence, that are prevalent in our current society, I can think of no better situation to lift to God in prayer. So, I emphatically say, "No!" when folks say that prayers are useless.
That said, I continue to think of the paralytic in Mark 2. His friends did not just pray for him and hope that Jesus would pass him by. They did not even go to Jesus to tell him where the paralytic was. Rather they make the effort to carry the paralytic, to dig a whole in the roof of the house, and to lower the paralytic precariously down through that hole. God gifts us with the ability to make a difference to those around us. I can't change what happened in Las Vegas; but I can do something about the way that I treat the people around me, I can do something about violence in my own community, I can do something about making sure our communities are safe. Prayer reminds us that we can't fix the laws and the situation all at once on a larger scale, and it inspires us to do what we can. Simply put, actions that don't recognize the size of the problem and the sovereignty of God won't fix it; prayers that don't inspire us to action aren't enough. We are called to balance the two: to give it over to God in prayer and to be inspired to do our part in God's Kingdom on earth.
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