Prayer: powerful? Useless? Undecided? Yeah….

Every night I lie in bed, shut my eyes and pray. The thing I like about prayer is that nobody has to know what you are praying about, nobody has to know if you are praying for them, it can be completely intimate, just between you and God.

Though I pray diligently each night, and often whisper small prayers throughout my day, to be completely honest, prayer can be frustrating. Sometimes I’ll pray about things for months on end, for years even, and nothing seems to change. At times I feel as though I could yell at the top of my lungs, a chorus of praise and desires flooding the ears of Heaven, and yet, still nothing. That’s why I started keeping a prayer journal.

I think about what it is that I’m praying for, and I write it down on the ivory pages of my journal. I only use the journal a few times a month, as my prayers don’t often change, but many of times the way I pray for something does change, and I will then write down the new way it’s being prayed for, and wait in exuberant expectation (literally) to see how God will work through my prayers.

Lately though…lately I’ve felt discouraged, as though my prayers would do far better shouted into a cave, then voiced up to God. Though this afternoon when I was checking my voicemail, I had received a message from one of my professors, who had been thinking about me and praying for me and she was just calling to tell me that.

I wish I could better explain the feeling that consumed me when I heard those words. She had been praying for me—what better thing could you ask of a person. And this was no person who I talked to on a regular basis, no person who necessarily knew to be praying for me, but she had been. God knew that I’d needed those prayers, and he instilled it into another’s heart to pray for me.

Suddenly I didn’t feel that my prayers were as empty as I’d deemed, suddenly, I began to realize that maybe all the people I’d been praying for needed those prayers, as I’d been needing the prayer, and just because I hadn’t seen direct results of my prayer, in no way meant they were useless.

In Isaiah 40 it asks who can be the consoler of the Lord—obviously no one. It paints that indelible theme that God knows more then we can ever know, and does things that are beyond us ever single second of our lives. Just because we become tired, just because we repeat the same things and just because things don’t always end the way we want them to, doesn’t mean we should cease prayer.

Prayer: powerful! There is not space enough to support why I believe this. And what a joy I find prayer to be, as I lie there each night, talking with God, and not only do I get to talk, but he really listens. Now that is cool.